A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  The Service of National Thanksgiving held at St Paul’s Cathedral on 27 February 1872 proved to be the long-wished-for public celebration of nationhood and monarchy. The whole of London was on the move from before dawn, on a day punctuated with bursts of chilly rain followed by sunshine.55Victoria and Bertie – he still very weak and haggard and walking with a limp (the result of a severe attack of gout) – traversed streets festooned with flags and bunting, floral wreaths and triumphal arches, with military bands playing ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘God Save the Prince of Wales’. Despite the cold, Victoria had specified an open landau so that the people could clearly see them in the convoy of nine carriages accompanied by a guard of honour. It took its route along Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, the Strand and up Fleet Street, past tiers of specially constructed seating to Temple Bar, all to ‘one mighty multitude and one continued acclamation’.56As on the occasion of Princess Alexandra’s progress across London in 1863, the best vantage points were sold at a premium, from ten shillings, to forty guineas for a balcony view on Fleet Street. But this royal occasion saw crowds larger even than the ‘Coronation, Exhibition, and Wellington mobs’ of 1838, 1851 and 1852. A major lack of provision for viewing the procession led to chaos: many who climbed trees in St James’s Park for a better view ended up in hospital with broken limbs, as did others who fell from windows and scaffolding; spectators were kicked by horses or knocked down by carriages; women and children fainted in the crush on Ludgate Hill and had to be hauled by ropes from the crowd.57

  Victoria was still in deep mourning, though she had at least left off her crape in favour of black silk, her jacket and skirt trimmed with a deep border of ermine and her bonnet decorated with white flowers. She seemed happier than she had been in the last ten years, waving and at one point raising Bertie’s hand and kissing it. He repeatedly lifted his hat in acknowledgement of the crowds; their deafening cheers as they passed were a ‘wonderful demonstration of loyalty and affection, from the very highest to the lowest’.58The congregation at St Paul’s had been awaiting them for several hours, but only fifty of these seats were set aside for ‘working men’, the rest having been fought over by the Upper Ten Thousand, as Reynolds’s Newspaper noted. Why had there been no provision, it asked, for the ‘people who labour’, who instead were left outside, ‘hustled, crushed and driven to and fro for the accommodation of “the quality”?’59French diplomat Charles Gavard and his entourage had gone to the cathedral wearing full ceremonial uniform – ‘It would tickle the Republic to see us pass,’ he quipped. ‘What a human flood as we drew near the City, as foul too as the waters of the Thames,’ he recalled. ‘No mob is like an English mob; the signs of misery are so unmistakable. They are both violent and humble under the blows dealt by the police; and the ragbag reigns among them.’ Gavard had taken up his place in the tiers of specially constructed benches at 11 a.m., ‘in a draught of cold air that douched us till two o’clock’.60Arthur Munby had been in the cathedral even longer – since 8 a.m. to be sure of a good view.

  At last the bells boomed out ‘like a volley of artillery’ as the Queen and Prince of Wales entered through the main doors, over which hung the inscription from Psalm 122: ‘I was glad when they said unto me, I will go into the House of the Lord.’ Victoria leaned heavily on Bertie’s arm as they processed up the nave to the raised scarlet gangway lined with Beefeaters. There they took their special pew in the centre of the aisle, amidst a congregation of army and navy officers, peers, MPs and ministers, judges, Kings of Arms and royal heralds. The whole congregation, as they did so, was gripped by a ‘royal silence that the sacredness of the place and the majesty of her office demanded – a real silence.’ Gavard had not been particularly impressed with the sight of the Queen: ‘fat and short…with a discontented-looking face’; but that silence – not the natural silence of the void, as he recalled, but ‘the silence of thousands of people holding their breath at the presence of the monarch finally among them’ – was quite extraordinary.61It was a ‘thrilling moment’, Munby recalled, when the organ sounded out, just as the sun broke through the clouds outside and ‘sent beams of slanting light down through the misty vault of the dome, upon the gold and scarlet and purple crowds below’. As the 250-strong choir burst into the words of the Te Deum, Lucy Cavendish, like many others, felt a shudder of recognition: ‘Never before had I realised what a Psalm of Thanksgiving it is, and most beautiful and moving were the words specially dwelt upon by the music:…“When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death”.’62

  After an hour-long service – ‘cold and too long’, as far as Victoria was concerned – the royal carriages returned to Buckingham Palace by a different route, taking an hour and a half to make their way the seven miles across the crowded streets.63Gratified by what had been ‘a most affecting day’, the Queen appeared shortly afterwards on the balcony to loud cheers, with Beatrice, Leopold, Arthur and Alfred.64As night fell the crowds were still out, as they had been in March 1863, linking arms, singing and dancing as they enjoyed the fireworks and gaslit illuminations across London. The dome of St Paul’s was encircled with coloured lights, ‘like St Peter’s in Rome on Easter day’, recalled Wemyss Reid; Fleet Street ‘looked quite medieval again’, thought Munby, ‘its gabled houses bright as day with lights and colour – flags on the houses, flags festooned across the street, and legends, such as the Te Deum, stretching all down the way on either side, white letters on a scarlet ground nailed to the windows.’65

  Inevitably criticisms were raised afterwards that the semi-state ceremony had not been sufficiently grand to match the significance of the occasion; Reynolds’s took the opposite line. Under the banner ‘Pinchbeck Loyalty: The Thanksgiving Tomfoolery’, it damned the whole thing as ‘a sickening display of hypocrisy, sycophancy, idolatry, idiocy and buffoonery’.66But such criticism was isolated; it had been, as Victoria herself noted, a ‘day of triumph’ during which both she and Bertie had been greatly moved and had found it hard to suppress their tears.67The common humanity displayed on the streets of London captured everyone’s imagination; Thanksgiving Day had in the end been as much about the Queen reappearing to ‘perform a function of Royalty in the Metropolis of her Empire’ as it had been about Bertie’s recovery.68In so doing she had prompted a resurgence of deep-rooted sentimentalism towards the monarchy that had not been witnessed since the early days of her reign. The real spectacle, though, as Gavard observed and the press echoed, was not that of monarchy on show, but of ‘the people, the never exhausted masses which covered all the pavements, filled all the windows and balconies and stands from street to housetop and spread themselves even over the roofs’. All of them demonstrated ‘the wisdom, the moderation, and the sound heart’ that had merited their recent wider enfranchisement.69This great and potent human spectacle had not just been one for the monarchy to take note of; it had also underlined the collective power of the nation at large to ensure the throne’s very survival.

  Two days after the Thanksgiving Service a further and even more emphatic death-blow was dealt to the republican cause. In response to the enormous public affection shown to her at St Paul’s, Victoria had driven out in Regent’s Park late on the afternoon of 29 February in an open landau with Arthur and Leopold to show herself once more to her people. She had returned as usual via the Garden Gate, where a dense crowd awaited her as the carriage entered the palace grounds. Just as Brown dismounted to help Victoria’s lady-in-waiting down from the carriage, a gaunt and shabby young man pushed forward, thrusting a pistol close to the Queen’s face. As Victoria screamed out ‘Save me!’, Brown ‘with a wonderful presence of mind’ seized the man, even as Prince Arthur jumped out to do likewise.70

  The author of this supposed ‘assassination’ attempt – the fifth that Victoria had faced since 1840 – was a seventeen-year-old Irishman named Arthur O’Connor, a great-nephew of the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor. In the mêlée at the gates he had managed to climb unnoticed over the ten-foot-high railings into the co
urtyard beyond, in order to get close to the Queen. His flintlock pistol, bought for four shillings a few days previously in a pawn shop, was faulty and unloaded – filled with scraps of leather and blue paper. His intention had not been to kill, but rather to frighten the Queen into signing the petition he carried for the release of Fenian prisoners. He had wanted to press the petition on her during the service at St Paul’s, but when he had been found lurking inside the cathedral the night before he had been ejected.71Soon after the attempt newsboys were, so Lucy Cavendish heard, running round the streets shouting, ‘Assassination of the Queen’. ‘If anything was wanted to send loyalty up to boiling-point, this attempt had done it!’ she remarked. A couple of days later, when Victoria drove out in Hyde Park once again in an open carriage ‘with no extra precautions’, the crowds ‘cheered famously’. Londoners once more returned to the gates of Buckingham Palace to stand and stare. When O’Connor’s case was tried at the Old Bailey, Victoria was offended that he did not receive a stiff penalty, for she took the whole thing as a serious attempt on her life. The Times disagreed, viewing it as absurdly overhyped: ‘Anything wilder or more irrational cannot well be conceived than this shop-boy’s plan of over-awing the crown.’72Claims that O’Connor was deranged were dismissed and he was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour and twenty strokes of the birch. Victoria was relieved to hear later that he had accepted the option of a one-way ticket to Australia, but O’Connor returned a couple of years later and, after being caught loitering near the palace again, was locked up in a lunatic asylum.

  Further outpourings of gratitude – this time for the Queen’s safe deliverance from mortal harm – again boosted public sympathy for the monarchy in the wave of renewed loyalty that continued to spread across Britain. Back on the campaign trail in the provinces, Charles Dilke found that his republican speeches encountered an increasingly hostile response. At Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham his words were often drowned out by loud singing of the national anthem. His appearance at Bolton provoked a riot and numerous casualties. On 19 March, when he introduced a motion in Parliament calling for a full public inquiry into the Queen’s personal expenditure, he was shouted down and defeated in the vote by 276 to two. Lady Lucy Cavendish had no doubts: these two recent, dramatic events had ‘melt[ed] all hearts’ and finally put paid to ‘grumbling Republicanism’. ‘What would seem like the one disloyal hand among three millions, and the fresh rush of loving feeling caused by it and by her courage’, had finally brought an end to Dilke’s cause. It had also raised the status and integrity of John Brown to new and unassailable heights. Certain that she owed her safety to him and him alone, Victoria rewarded her good Highland servant with a gold Devoted Service Medal, promoted him to the ancient title of Esquire and gave him an annuity of £25. The ‘trusty, respectable yeoman’ John Brown, so long despised by the royal household, was now a hero to the working classes.73

  Chapter Fifteen

  Albertopolis

  The events of winter 1871–2 and the National Thanksgiving that followed proved to be a significant turning point for the British monarchy. By the end of 1872, with the return of economic prosperity and an easing of public disgruntlement, Charles Dilke and many of his supporters had retreated, realising that the future lay with increased representation of the people and the maintenance, however flawed, of the political status quo. When it came down to it, the Queen was a stabilising force, if only for her longevity, and they shifted their attention instead to the abuses of privilege among the aristocracy in the House of Lords. Working-class republicanism might stumble on for a year or two more, but it lacked political focus. The ‘fearful storm of loyalty’ that had marked the Prince of Wales’s recovery had, declared the National Reformer, proved ‘how little at present republicanism had permeated the general population’, confirming that a deep-seated loyalty to the throne and a veneration of Victoria as monarch still largely prevailed.1The moral example of the throne, dormant for ten years since Albert’s death, had found its renaissance in adversity.

  Victoria’s worries about her son and heir did not, however, abate for long; hopes that Bertie’s near-death experience might reform his character faded as he slid back into old habits, confirming his mother’s long-standing mistrust of him. By June 1872 she was once more bewailing the shortcomings of her thirty-one-year-old son: ‘If only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me!’2Had Albert lived, she told Vicky, he would never have coped with the shame not just of Bertie, but also of his brother Affie’s immoral behaviour: ‘he would have suffered from many inevitable things which have taken place and which he never would have approved’. She was glad he had been spared this, for ‘he could not have borne it’.3It was better to shoulder the burden alone. She would never relinquish any power to her son all the time there was breath in her body; nor did she feel the need for his advice on matters of state. Albert had set the template on that score, and to that she rigidly adhered. Since Bertie’s illness she was more forgiving, learning to live with his inadequacies and appreciating better his innate kindness and affection. But for the rest of his mother’s reign the Prince of Wales had to pay the price of a life of imposed idleness – frittering away his useful years in the shallow pursuit of women, horses and gambling in the watering holes of Europe and country houses of England.

  As for a resumption of Victoria’s public duties, the events of 1871–2, while doing much to turn the tide of her unpopularity, did little immediately to alter the deeply ingrained habits of the previous decade. The insularity and self-absorption of those lost years had seen a hardening of her least-attractive image as the dour, prudish, humourless and repressive Widow at Windsor – an erroneous view that has come down through history, and which has marginalised the Queen’s many good attributes. These worst excesses of stubborn self-interest had indeed seen her become at times ‘maddening, cruel, hateful, pitiful, impossible’.4But out of so much darkness and negativity there finally emerged the monarch whose great virtues – lack of vanity, human sympathy, an absolute honesty and sound common sense – finally gained the ascendant in her later years. True, Victoria still stuck to her favoured routine of long periods out of sight at Balmoral and Windsor, and avoided Buckingham Palace at all costs. But her resistance softened after 1872, for she now better understood how crucial her public popularity was and that she could no longer remain totally invisible. Her increased appearances were never enough to silence her critics entirely; complaints about her seclusion persisted, with pamphlets such as ‘Worthy a Crown?’ and ‘The Vacant Throne’ raising the issue again in 1876 and 1877; but in general, by the end of the 1870s, public antipathy had waned and the level of complaint had died down. Much of Victoria’s emergence from the cocoon of mourning at this time came thanks to the return to power of her adored Disraeli in 1874, when under his persuasive guidance she gradually became more visible at the head of the kind of informal, accessible monarchy initiated by Prince Albert before his death. Her elevation to Empress of India under the Royal Titles Act of 1876, at her own request, did much to swell national pride as well as Victoria’s ego. The triumph of her Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 respectively incontrovertibly set the seal on the Queen as the figurehead of an ideology linking monarch and people with burgeoning colonial expansion, imperial greatness and national pride.5

  While the Queen’s grief for Prince Albert inevitably mellowed as the years passed, it was clear to all that the ageing monarch would never give up her widow’s weeds. It suited her needs: Victoria might at last be reconciled to life without her husband, but to leave off her black, apart from being a betrayal of his sacred memory, would be to give notice of a return to normality – the one thing she wished to avoid. Her widow’s weeds had become her shield and protector, and she clung steadfastly to them as she continued to battle with her irrational feelings of being overwhelmed and unable to cope. It was, to a certain extent, a very warped self-image; Victoria’s perception of herself as the poor, weak, broken-hearted widow with shatt
ered nerves had trapped her in a contradiction of what time and again she had demonstrated so clearly to others: her natural intelligence, the force of her indomitable personality and her great powers of endurance.6

  Inevitably the ostentatious mourning rituals that she indulged in became outmoded, as social mores changed and the discussion of death increasingly became a taboo subject, but by now they had become the signifiers of Victoria’s personal style as monarch, remaining very real, very visceral and absolutely central to who she was. Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, meanwhile, would continue to sigh about the cross they had to bear of wearing only lavender, white and grey for the remainder of her reign, for they were never allowed out of half-mourning when on duty; and time and again they were sent back into black as Victoria’s friends and relatives died. If anything, the Queen’s meticulous observation of the minutiae of bereavement deepened with the years, extending to her drawing-up of a detailed code of etiquette for the arrangement of all royal layings-out and funerals, which included specific instructions on the different types of shroud to be used for male and female, married and unmarried. With a series of deaths in the family and her entourage, she was kept indefinitely preoccupied, turning the performance of grief into her own very personal art form. There were many deaths for her to mourn, and in quick succession. In the 1870s she lost Lord Clarendon, Sir James Clark, General Grey, the former head of the royal nursery Lady Lyttleton, her favourite Scottish minister Reverend Macleod, her dear friend Countess Blücher, her old governess Baroness Lehzen, the devoted Lady Augusta Stanley, her literary hero Charles Dickens and her old friend Napoleon III – to name but a few. Dwelling on such losses was consoling for her; the constancy of the loyal mourner carrying the flame for the departed ‘till all my widowed race be run’ was a virtue she had long cultivated.7None was more mourned than her dear half-sister Feodora, when she died of cancer in September 1872. Victoria saw it as a turning point, one of the last links with her past. ‘God’s will be done,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘I stand so alone now, no near and dear one near my own age, or older, to whom I could look up to, left. All, all gone! She was my last near relative on an equality with me, the last link with my childhood and youth.’8