7. Land and Shannon, Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, vol. II, p. 291; RA VIC/MAIN/R2/6: 24 December; Dyson and Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, p. 54.
8. Dyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, pp. 66–7.
9. Jackman and Haasse, eds, Stranger in the House, p. 227, Letter to Lady Malet, 30 December 1861. Queen Sophie exchanged numerous gossipy letters at the time with those privy to the events close to the Queen and the royal household, including Lady Malet, the Duchess of Westmorland, Lady Ely, Lord Clarendon, the Duchess of Cambridge and Lady Cowley, but sadly none of their letters to her survive in the Royal Dutch Archives at The Hague.
10. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 30.
11. Martineau, Selected Letters, pp. 196–7; Vincent, p. 181.
12. Benson & Esher, III: 476.
13. Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby, p. 47.
14. RA VIC/ADDA8/376: letter of 19 December 1861, pp. 5–6.
15. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 27; RA VIC/MAIN/R/2/3: 24 December 1861.
16. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 4; News International Archive, TT/ED/JTD/A/022, Torrington Letters, c. 19 December; Wellesley, The Paris Embassy, p. 229.
17. Chapel & Pollard, Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 671, 26 December 1861; Moran, Journal of Benjamin Moran, vol. 2, p. 957, 24 December 1861.
18. Morning Post, 16 December; Daily Telegraph, 19 December; Essex & West Suffolk Gazette, 20 December; Daily Telegraph, 25 December.
19. Daily News, 25 and 26 December.
20. Russell, My Diary, p. 218.
21. New York Times, 5 January 1862; Maria Lydig Daly, Diary of a Union Lady 1861–65, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1962, p. 106.
22. Charles Reynolds Brown, Lincoln, The Greatest Man of the Nineteenth Century, New York: Little & Ives, 1922, p. 58.
23. Russell, My Diary, pp. 218–19. News that Mason and Slidell and their secretaries had been released and put on a steamer for Southampton did not reach the British press till 8 January 1862.
24. RA VIC/MAIN/M/58/4: 19 December 1861.
25. News International Archive, TT/ED/JTD/A/022, Torrington letters: c. 19 December 1861.
26. RA VIC/MAIN/M/58/16: 26 December 1861.
27. Watson, Queen at Home, p. 156.
28. New York Times, 5 January 1861; Martineau, Selected Letters, letter to Henry Reeve, Christmas Day 1861.
29. C. E. Byles, The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker, London: John Lane, 1905, p. 353.
30. Daily News, 20 December; Morning Post, 16 December.
Part Two: The Broken-Hearted Widow
Chapter 9: ‘All Alone!’
1. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 251; RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ: 1 January 1862.
2. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 1 January 1862.
3. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
4. Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 451.
5. Queen Victoria’s ‘Album Consolativum’ appears to have been passed on to her daughter Vicky in Berlin after the Queen’s death in 1901 – perhaps to comfort the former Empress in her own terminal illness – she died of cancer seven months after her mother. The album is now in the British Library, BL Add. 62089; a second volume (62090) was started in 1872, but never completed.
6. Dasent, Delane, p. 48.
7. Bolitho, Further Letters of Queen Victoria, p. 118; RA VIC/ADDA8/390, Miss Ella Taylor’s Reminiscences of HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, p. 51.
8. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 308.
9. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 47.
10. Jenni Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 21; Wake, Princess Louise, p. 47.
11. RA VIC/ADDU/16, Lord Hertford’s Account of Queen Victoria, Osborne, 1862, pp. 4–5.
12. Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 188.
13. RA VIC/ADDA8/380: Miss Ella Taylor’s Reminiscences of HRH The Duchess of Cambridge.
14. Erskine, Twenty Years at Court, p. 395.
15. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 47.
16. Buckle, Letters of Queen Victoria [hereafter Buckle], I: 9.
17. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 189; Dasent, Delane, p. 46.
18. Countess Blücher, née Madeline Dallas, was the daughter of the Lord Chief Justice. She married Count Gustavus Blücher von Wahlstadt in 1828. She was a close friend of Vicky in Berlin and attended the birth of her first child, Wilhelm, in 1859. The Countess died on 19 March 1870.
19. Sir Edwin Landseer said of Skerrett that ‘If anything goes wrong in Buckingham Palace, Balmoral, or Windsor, whether a crowned head or a scullery maid is concerned, Miss Skerrett is always sent for to put it right.’ Skerrett was the daughter of an officer who had served with distinction in the Peninsular War. See John Callcott Horsely, Recollections of a Royal Academician, London: John Murray, 1903, p. 128.
20. For an interesting discussion of Queen Victoria’s ladies, see Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, pp. 212–17.
21. See Dulcie M. Ashdown, Ladies-in-Waiting, London: Arthur Barker, pp. 178–80.
22. The Duchess of Athole (1814–97) was widowed in 1864. Like Lady Jane Churchill (1826–1900), who remained with the Queen for forty-six years, Athole died still in service to Victoria. Lady Ely (1821–90) finally managed to retire in 1889 after thirty-eight years of devoted service.
23. Buckle, I: 12; RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 21 January. Sadly, the spontaneous and more heartfelt expressions of popular support that must have been sent to the Queen from semi-literate, ordinary members of the public have not survived in the Royal Archives. The more formal tributes of monarchs and statesmen are, however, plentiful.
24. Kenyon, Scenes in the Life of the Royal Family, p. 224.
25. RA VIC/MAIN/Y/83/63: 1 February 1862.
26. Lily Wolpitz, ed., The Diaries of John Rose of Cape Town 1848–1873, Cape Town: Friends of South African Library, 1990, p. 97; Purves, Letters from the Cape, p. 47.
27. Purves, Letters from the Cape, p. 71; Orfeur Cavanagh, Reminiscences of an Indian Official, London: W. Allen, 1884, pp. 320–2; unpublished letter of Ra Haniraka, 3 March 1862, courtesy Ian Shapiro.
28. ‘Address of the New Zealand Chiefs to Her Majesty, on the Death of the Prince Consort’, forwarded by the governor of NZ, Sir George Grey, Annual Register, 1862, vol. 104, p. 503.
29. Buckle, I: 6.
30. Tooley, Personal Life of Queen Victoria, pp. 204–5.
31. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 257.
32. Another similar marble bust of Albert by Theed was completed in 1862 and two years later placed in the entrance hall at Osborne. See Darby & Smith, Cult, p. 7.
33. Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch, p. 181.
34. See Crown and Camera, pp. 23–5, and Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, pp. 56–7.
35. Zeepvat, Prince Leopold, p. 32.
36. A plaster cast of the statue was placed at the foot of the staircase at Balmoral that August and replaced with the marble version in October 1863. A massive bronze version of the statue, on a bust of rough stone, was later erected in the castle grounds for all the Queen’s staff to see. See Darby & Smith, Cult, p. 11.
37. Bennett, King without a Crown, p. 376; Martin, II: 537. A statue was eventually raised in 1863, though in front of the Royal Albert Hall, not far from the Albert Memorial, rather than in the park.
38. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 199.
39. News International Archive, TT/ED/JTD/A/022, Torrington Letters.
40. The Times, 15 January 1862; Temple Bar, vol. IV, 1862, p. 575.
41. Morning Post, 13 August 1862; Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 199.
42. Storey, ed., Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 10, pp. 28 and 69: 1 February 1862 and 10 April 1862.
43. Dasent, Delane, pp. 44–5.
44. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 36.
45. Battiscombe, ‘Gerald Wellesley’, pp. 134–5; Darby & Smith, Cult, p. 23.
46. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, pp. 189, 207.
47. Villiers, Vanished Victorian, p. 317.
48. Ibid., pp.
317, 319.
49. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, p. 323; Maxwell, Life of Letters of…4th Earl of Clarendon, p. 257.
50. Annual Register, vol. 104, p. 10; Wiebe, Letters of Benjamin Disraeli, vol. 8, p. 170.
51. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 26 February; Hibbert, Court at Windsor, p. 212.
52. Epton, Queen Victoria and her Daughters, p. 102; Corti, English Empress, p. 81.
53. RA VIC/ADDU/16, Lord Hertford’s Account of Queen Victoria; Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 40; Kennedy, My Dear Duchess; Villiers, Vanished Victorian, p. 315.
54. RA VIC/ADDU/16, Lord Hertford’s Account of Queen Victoria.
55. Villiers, Vanished Victorian, p. 313.
56. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 56.
57. Buckle, I: 20.
58. Gladstone to the Duchess of Sutherland, 24 February 1862, BL Add. MS 44, 326 fos 44–5, and Sutherland to Gladstone, 26 February, fos 46–51. See also Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, pp. 215–16.
59. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, p. 198; Storey, Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 10, p. 54.
60. Whittle, Victoria and Albert, p. 118; Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, pp. 186, 188–9, 191; Darby & Smith, Cult, p. 11; Downer, Queen’s Knight, p. 129.
61. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 262.
62. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 189; RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 15 March; Dasent, Delane, pp. 48–9.
63. Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 3, p. 263.
64. Dyson & Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, p. 65.
65. Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 124–5.
66. Dyson & Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, p. 124; Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 1, p. 207.
67. Dyson & Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, p. 69.
68. ‘On the bald street breaks the blank day’, In Memoriam, canto VII, in Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 326.
69. Dyson & Tennyson, Dear and Honoured Lady, pp. 69–70.
70. Ibid., p. 76.
Chapter 10: ‘The Luxury of Woe’
1. RA VIC/ADDA22/77; Staniland, In Royal Fashion, p. 156; Illustrated London News, 28 December 1861.
2. Staniland, In Royal Fashion, p. 156.
3. Leeds Mercury, 17 December 1861.
4. Illustrated London News, 28 December 1861.
5. George Frederick Pardon, Routledge’s Popular Guide to London and Its Suburbs, London, 1862, front advertising.
6. King, The Dying Game, pp. 106–7; Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, pp. 63–4. Courtaulds soon developed large-scale production of its own cheaper, coarser fabric – ‘Albert crape’ – more durable and half the price, which during the 1870s was targeted at the burgeoning market among the lower middle and working classes.
7. Goldthorpe, From Queen to Empress, pp. 69–70. The expression the ‘luxury of woe’ or ‘luxury of grief’ was a commonly used one at the time in poetry, philosophical writing; see e.g. The Poetical Works of Thomas More, 1826, Paris: Galignani, 1827, p. 246: ‘Weep on, and as thy sorrows flow, I’ll taste the luxury of woe’; Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989, p. 66–7.
8. Christina Walkley, Ghost in the Looking Glass, London: Peter Owen, 1981, p. 29; Goldthorpe, From Queen to Empress, p. 76. A common complaint suffered by overworked seamstresses was temporary nystagmus, where the eye involuntarily flicks from side to side in rapid swinging motion and prevents the sufferer from fixing their gaze on an object. Kristine Hughes, Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian Britain, Cincinnatti: Writers Digest Books, 1998, pp. 217–18.
9. Staniland, In Royal Fashion, pp. 155–6.
10. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 1 July.
11. It was not until her Golden Jubilee of 1887 that the Queen was prevailed upon, thanks to the intervention of the Princess of Wales, to allow ladies at court to wear something other than jet. She agreed to silver and increasingly adopted it herself, thus sparking a new fashion and the further erosion of the jet trade.
12. Crawford, Victoria, Queen and Ruler, pp. 331–2.
13. The 1871 census listed 1,006 jet workers in the town. See Noreen Vickers, ‘The Structure of the Whitby Jet Industry in 1871’, http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/PDF/LPS38/LPS38–1987–8–17.pdf
14. McMillan, Whitby Jet Through the Years, pp. 74–6, 211, 226. The Whitby jet trade began to decline from the mid-1870s in the face of cheap foreign imports of imitation glass ‘jet’ from France, as well as vulcanite and poorer-quality jet from Spain. Thereafter trade in Whitby jet rapidly collapsed and the workforce shrank to 300.
15. RA VIC/ADDC6: 30 June 1862, diary of Lady Geraldine Somerset.
16. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 59.
17. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, p. 327.
18. Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 185, 187.
19. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 24 May; Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 62.
20. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, p. 187.
21. Bodleian Library Special Collections, Clarendon Papers, MS Eng.e.2122, Lady Katherine Clarendon diary for 3 February 1862; British Library, Add. MS 44289, Gladstone Papers, vol. CXCV: 16 March 1862.
22. Wyndham, Correspondence of Lady Lyttleton, p. 348.
23. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 20 June.
24. Noel, Princess Alice, p. 88.
25. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 60, 83, 74.
26. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, pp. 196–7.
27. Aston, Duke of Connaught, pp. 47–8.
28. RA VIC/ADDC6: 1 July 1862, Journal of Lady Geraldine Somerset.
29. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 85.
30. Daily News, 2 July 1862.
31. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6 July 1862.
32. A. MacGeorge, Wm. Leighton Leitch Landscape Painter, A Memoir, London: L. Blackie & Son, 1884, p. 63.
33. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 101.
34. Ibid., p. 102; the quotation is from Wisdom, chapter IV.
35. Anon, Queen’s Resolve, p. 104.
36. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s Private Life, pp. 66–8.
37. Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, p. 201.
38. Connell, Regina vs. Palmerston, p. 331.
39. RA VIC/ADDA/25/85: 4 October 1862, letter to Howard Elphinstone; Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, p. 332.
40. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 22 July.
41. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 130; Windsor & Bolitho, pp. 272, 273.
42. RA VIC/ADDA/8/384: ‘Miss Ella Taylor’s Reminiscences of HRH The Duchess of Cambridge’, p. 2.
43. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 138, 139, 142.
44. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1862: 14 December 1862.
45. Ashwell & Wilberforce, Life of Bishop Wilberforce, p. 72.
46. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 148.
47. Walsh, Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria, p. 116.
48. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 153.
49. Belfast News-letter, 1 December 1862.
Chapter 11: ‘A Married Daughter I Must Have Living with Me’
1. Dasent, Delane, p. 64.
2. Hudson, Munby, p. 152.
3. Strafford, Henry Greville, p. 106.
4. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 98, 126.
5. Ibid., pp. 172, 165.
6. Morier Family Papers, Balliol College, Oxford, K1/4/4, Queen Victoria, letter to General Peel, 25 January 1864.
7. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, p. 154; Greville, Leaves, vol, 4,. p. 109.
8. Cooke, Princess Mary Adelaide, vol. 1, p. 407; Wiebe, Letters of Benjamin Disraeli, vol. 8, p. 261.
9. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 180.
10. Hibbert, Edward VII, p. 62; Windsor & Bolitho, p. 308.
11. The wedding was extensively described in the newspapers and in journals such as The Times, Telegraph, Daily News, Morning Chronicle, etc. for 11 March. The Queen’s own account can be found in Hibbert, Letters and Journals, pp. 172–4; the account of Disraeli is in Wiebe, Letters of Benjamin Disraeli, vol. 8, pp. 412–13; Windsor & Bolitho, pp. 281–8, 306–12; Lord Clarendon, in Kennedy, My Dear Duchess, pp. 210–15; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, pp.
154–7; Battiscombe, Princess Alexandra, pp. 43–50. Munby’s vivid description of the crowds in London is in Hudson, Munby, pp. 149–53.
12. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 172.
13. Hudson, Munby, p. 153.
14. Frederick Pollock, Personal Reminiscences of Sir Frederick Pollock, vol. 2, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 110–11.
15. Strafford, Henry Greville, vol. 4, p. 110.
16. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 192, 193.
17. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 177.
18. Chomet, Helena, p. 17.
19. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 1, pp. 199, 214.
20. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 226, 209, 212.
21. Ibid., pp. 235, 213.
22. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 178.
23. Elphinstone, Queen Thanks Sir Howard, p. 64; Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 245.
24. The Times, 12 October 1863.
25. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 273.
26. Morning Post, 15 October 1863.
27. Ibid.
28. The Times, 12 October 1863.
29. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 75; Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 178.
30. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 179; Windsor & Bolitho, p. 294.
31. Magnus, Gladstone, p. 160; Arengo Jones, Queen Victoria and Switzerland, p. 21.
32. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 74.
33. Arengo Jones, Queen Victoria and Switzerland, p. 18.
34. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 178.
35. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 205–6.
36. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 181.
37. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, p. 352.
38. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, pp. 184, 185.
39. Ibid., p. 185.
40. Manchester Examiner, 19 March 1864; Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, pp. 86–7.
41. Saturday Review, 26 March 1864.
42. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, p. 207; E. F. Benson, As We Were, London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1930, p. 38.
43. Watson, Queen at Home, p. 166; Tooley, Personal Life, p. 212.
44. Maxwell, Life and Letters of 4th Earl Clarendon, vol. II, p. 293.
45. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby, pp. 209, 210.
46. Ibid., p. 211.
47. Dasent, Delane, vol. II, pp. 108, 110.
48. Ibid., p. 130.
49. McMillan, Whitby Jet Through the Years, p. 212.
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 39
