Sons, Servants and Statesmen (40 page)

The Queen was saddened that this gifted son had become almost a stranger to her, and that as a person this withdrawn, surly, over-bibulous man (or ‘imprudent’, as she discreetly put it) was clearly less liked than his brothers. Yet she was glad to welcome him home at the time of the diamond jubilee, and again in May 1899 when he joined the rest of the family at Windsor for celebrations in the town and at the Castle to mark her eightieth birthday.

By this time, however, he was a broken man. The Duke and Duchess’s silver wedding celebrations in January, at which they put on their usual display of family unity, were marred by the plight of their only son, Alfred. He had shot himself after an unhappy love affair with a commoner, Mabel Fitzgerald, whom some sources say he had married in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act; sent to convalesce at Meran in the Tyrol, he died of his injuries a week later. For years, the official cause of his death was said to be consumption or, as an official correspondent told
The Times
, ‘chronic cerebral affection’.
¹³
The next heir to the duchy of Coburg was Charles, the fifteen-year-old son of the Duke and Duchess of Albany who had been born three months after his father’s death.

Alfred took to drinking even more heavily after his son’s tragic death but managed to distance himself so much from his family that none of them had any idea how ill he was. In June 1900 a group of specialists at Vienna held a consultation and discovered a carcinomatous growth at the root of his tongue, in such an advanced stage that any operation would have been useless. He had six months to live at the most, but in his case there was nothing much left to live for. On 25 July the Queen received a telegram from the physicians, telling her that the Duke of Edinburgh’s condition was hopeless. Initially it was withheld from her on the instructions of Beatrice, who wished to spare her any more upsetting news. Britain was at war with the Boers in South Africa, and the Queen was already thoroughly depressed at the news of military reverses suffered by her Army.

That weekend Alfred’s surgeons at Gotha made preparations to give him a tracheotomy to assist his breathing, but it was too late. On the evening of 30 July he died in his sleep.

‘Oh, God! My poor darling Affie gone too!’ the Queen wrote in her journal. ‘One sorrow, one trial, one anxiety, following another! It is a horrible year, nothing but sadness and horrors of one kind and another.’
¹⁴
The news came exactly a day after the assassination of King Humbert of Italy; he was not related to the family, but any news of royal assassinations at such a time was bound to depress her further. She had seen Alfred very little during the last few years, and of all her sons he had been the one least close to her in adult life. Yet she was deeply upset by his passing, and felt her family and doctors ‘should never have withheld the truth’ from her as long as they did.
¹⁵
She tried to console herself with recollections of his childhood, when he had seemed to hold such great promise, with his love of building mechanical toys and learning geography. To Marie Mallet she talked sadly one evening about his happy days at Osborne, his childish likes and dislikes, and the lady-in-waiting could see that to the elderly woman ‘he was once more the happy boy’.
¹⁶

Although the Duke had never been the most popular member of the family with the British public, the Lord Mayor of London paid tribute to him in a speech opening the proceedings of a conference on the War Funds Organisation at Mansion House, the day after his death, recognising ‘his devotion to his profession as a sailor, his passionate love for music, and his intense affection for his native land’.
¹⁷
In Devonport, with which he had been closely identified in the years immediately preceding his succession to the German dukedom, his identification with philanthropic institutions in the district was fondly remembered.

The Prince of Wales represented the family at his brother’s funeral at Coburg. On his way back from the ceremony, he visited the widowed Empress Frederick in her home at Friedrichshof, near Kronberg. For over a year, the family had been alarmed at rumours about her state of health, and he learnt that she too was mortally stricken with cancer of the spine. She was in agony much of the time, almost bedridden, and sometimes her attacks of pain were so severe that it seemed as if she, like Affie, might predecease their mother. Bertie returned home in a mood of black depression.

At Osborne, Christmas 1900 was the saddest the family had known since the Prince Consort’s death. Since the autumn, Queen Victoria’s normally healthy appetite had become poor, and she was now almost blind. She knew that soon it would be time for her eldest son to come into the inheritance for which he had been destined since birth. While they had been at Balmoral in the first week of November, Marie Mallet thought it curious that the Queen remarked to her how she wished to die after the Prince Consort’s death, but now she wanted to live and do what she could for her country and those whom she loved. Mrs Mallet thought it ‘a very remarkable utterance’ for a woman of her age, and as it was not the first time she had spoken along such lines, she wondered whether the Queen ‘dreads the influence of the Prince of Wales?’
¹⁸
Even if she had forgiven and forgotten his involvement with the Tranby Croft affair and other indiscretions, she suspected that others had not.

‘Another year begun and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly,’
¹⁹
she wrote in her journal on 1 January 1901, or rather dictated, as she could no longer see to write herself. On 17 January she had a mild stroke, and the family were warned to prepare for the worst. The Prince of Wales arrived at Osborne from Sandringham, and the Duke of Connaught was summoned from Berlin, where he had been attending celebrations for the bicentenary of the Hohenzollern dynasty. With them came their eldest nephew, Emperor William, who, for all the disrespectful utterances behind his grandmother’s back, had always revered and respected her deeply.

They joined the hushed vigil around the bed at Osborne where the Queen lay dying, slipping away like ‘a great three-decker ship sinking’, in the words of her son-in-law Lord Lorne. On 22 January, shortly before she became unconscious for the last time, with a supreme effort of strength which was almost beyond her, she held out her arms to the Prince of Wales, as she softly mouthed the word ‘Bertie’. At about 6.30 that evening, the Dean of Windsor was reading the prayers for the dying and noticed that she was staring at the Prince of Wales and at Dr Reid, who was sitting in front of the heir. Then her eyes flickered, and seemed to be gazing at the figure of the dead Christ in a painting over the fireplace. Then, the Bishop noticed, there was a change of look and complete calm. She opened her eyes wide, ‘and knew she saw beyond the Border land and had seen and met all her loved ones’. As he finished reading the prayer, she quietly drew her last breath.

Prompted by Reid, her eldest son – who in that instant had become king – leaned forward, closed her eyes, and then broke down.
²⁰

When Queen Victoria died, she left a strong and prosperous country behind her. Her reign had seen enormous changes, and the next few decades would usher in many more. She bequeathed her eldest son a strong, well-respected throne which had weathered the scandals of only a few years earlier, and during his nine-year reign he would inaugurate a very different, more affable, yet equally popular style of monarchy. The political landscape of Britain was changing, with the issue of Home Rule for Ireland – as tackled with scant success by Gladstone – gaining momentum, and with Labour members of parliament on the way to supplanting the Liberals as the alternative party to the Conservatives in opposition and then in government. Britain’s relations with her European neighbours would also undergo radical change, with the Queen’s eldest grandson in Berlin, Emperor William, proclaiming his adoration for England, only to find himself a powerless exile in Holland less than twenty years later.

Edwardian Britain was a swan-song for, or in some respects an orderly closing chapter of, the Victorian age, before the outbreak of the First World War brought the curtain down on the old order. That the country made a relatively orderly transition to the new world beyond and came to terms with its status as a reduced world power can be attributed in part to the legacy and influence of the Queen, and the men who ruled the country, represented her and worked with her during the nineteenth century.

Abbreviations: QVJ: Queen Victoria’s Journal (Royal Archives); NA: National Archives, London; A: Albert, Prince Consort; KL: King Leopold of the Belgians; QV: Queen Victoria (including references to her before accession); V: Princess Victoria, later German Crown Princess and Empress; RA: Royal Archives

Chapter One (pp. 3–19)