We Two: Victoria and Albert (71 page)

Repeatedly reassured by the physicians she trusted, the Queen, while reporting her husband’s symptoms with her customary clarity and detail, assured her correspondents, notably her daughter in Berlin, her uncle in Brussels, and Stockmar in Coburg, that the prince consort would soon be back on his feet. At first she was dismissive about her husband’s health problems and inclined to blame the patient, as we see from her letters to King Leopold. November 26: “Albert is a little rheumatic [sic], which is a plague, but … he is much better this winter than he was the preceding years.” December 4: Albert’s rheumatism “has become an influenza … he has difficulty eating and sleeping, and is confined to his room … but today a lot better.” The situation is “very disagreeable, as you know he is always
so
depressed when anything is the matter with him.” December 9: “Every day … is bringing us nearer the end of this tiresome illness, which is much what I had at Ramsgate [in 1835] only that I was much worse, and not at first well attended to.”

On December 6, Dr. Jenner decided that Clark’s psychological strategy must be abandoned. Jenner had, reportedly, observed on the prince’s torso the rash of flat, pink spots that is often an early symptom of typhoid. He told the Queen that her husband was suffering from a fever but assured her that there was still every hope. At this point, the doctors insisted that the prince should not dress but should keep in bed. They advised the Queen, who had also gotten no sleep for many nights and was obviously exhausted, to move into a separate bedroom. On December 8, the prince consort became delirious and failed to recognize his wife. His irritability increased, but he also showed moments of deep tenderness toward members of his family. He continued to move restlessly between bed and couch, and from room to room. At his request, the Blue Room at the castle was set up as a sickroom, and the Queen had a cot next door. Both George IV and William IV had died in the Blue Room.

The prince consort’s doctors had the full confidence of the Queen but not of the prime minister. Through a secret correspondence with Sir Charles Phipps, the prince’s private secretary, Lord Palmerston was kept constantly up to date on events in the sickroom. From the first, he feared the worst and was desolate. Palmerston and the prince had long jousted for
power, but Palmerston was above all a patriot. He knew how much the country owed to the prince’s intelligence, information, and selfless commitment to public service. Palmerston had also known the Queen since she was a girl of eighteen. He loved her very much, and he knew how deeply her husband’s death would affect her.

Acting on strong emotion, Palmerston wrote on December 11, begging the Queen to get some new medical opinions. Victoria was dreadfully upset. It was being suggested not only that the prince was in danger but that he was receiving inadequate care. She replied that the prince consort was extremely irritated by the constant attentions even of doctors he had long known. This was true. The only doctor Albert really trusted was Stockmar, and in his delirium he asked for his old friend. But, determined to show that she was not refusing advice, merely protecting the beloved patient, Victoria permitted two doctors to come but not to stay or be a worry. Sir Henry Holland, an aged society doctor, came but had nothing new to offer. Dr. Thomas Watson, an excellent young clinician, on the other hand, soon won the Queen’s approval.

On December 11, the doctors felt that the public needed to know something, so daily bulletins on the prince’s state of health were begun. They were short and vague and unalarming. No one outside the government and the court understood the gravity of the situation. But the Queen rightly saw that the bulletins were another sign that things were not going well, and she began to despair and to reach out for the comfort and support of friends. She sent for her former lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Bruce and for Dr. Gerald Wellesley the dean of Windsor, her favorite man of the cloth. On December 12, Victoria failed for the first time to record the events of the day in her diary. As for the prince, he knew what was coming. Asked by her father if she had written to her older sister in Berlin, Princess Alice replied that she had told Vicky that he was very ill. “You did wrong,” he commented. “You should have told her I am dying. Yes. I am dying.”

The prince consort’s doctors watched over him night and day, spared no thought or effort, and, given the medical limitations of the day, gave him exemplary care. This was especially true of old Sir James Clark. The unfortunate prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, Camille Cavour, who also contracted typhoid in 1861, was allegedly bled to death by his doctors, but the prince consort’s doctors did not resort to “heroic” medicine. Palliative care was the best the medical profession of the time had to offer, and this was the approach taken by Clark’s team. The prince was given opium and ether to ease his pain and allow him some hours of sleep. He was encouraged, uselessly but harmlessly, to eat simple foods like soup and brown
bread. When he seemed close to slipping away, he was revived with brandy. Albert’s doctors spoke of allowing the disease to take its course and of having seen many patients recover. This was all accurate and sound.

Perhaps it would have helped if the prince had collapsed and taken to his bed in mid-November, instead of keeping up the hollow ritual of normal life. Perhaps it would have helped if he had been nursed in a warm, quiet, controlled environment instead of wandering from room to room and bed to bed, while his wife spread Eau de Cologne on his sheets and a gaggle of family members, equerries, doctors, and servants looked on. But probably not. Restlessness is a classic symptom of typhoid, and to be tied to a bed would have been cruel. The prince consort had never been alone in a room by himself. The solitude of a modern hospital room would have been torture for him.

Unlike poor typhoid patients in the fever hospitals of his time, the prince was kept warm, well nourished, and scrupulously clean. His shirts and bed linen were changed often. Above all, he was surrounded by love and care and consideration. The visits of his little daughter Beatrice may have cheered him up, even in delirium. Hearing Alice play his favorite chorale in the next room at his request could not stop the torment, but it was a memory of happiness, and an expression of love.

The dying prince’s lack of privacy has troubled some biographers. At the time of his death, the onlookers in the Blue Room included his wife, his daughters Alice, Helena, and Louise, his son Bertie, the Queen’s nephew Charles Leiningen and his wife, Albert’s private secretary Sir Charles Phipps, his German valet Rudolph Löhlein (the successor to Isaac Cart), the dean of Windsor, and presumably one or more doctors. The princesses’ governess Miss Hildyard, Lady Augusta Bruce, and her brother General Bruce, the Prince of Wales’s governor, huddled in the doorway. But surely it is better to die at home, in the room you have chosen, with people you love all around you.

Alice, the prince’s oldest daughter at home, was his best nurse. Her strength and courage never failed. One report has it that she was ready to do things for her father that were considered improper in a woman and a princess—presumably she helped change his linen after diarrhea or vomiting. It was to Alice that the prince confided that he knew he was dying. It was Alice who had the foresight to telegraph her brother Bertie at Cambridge to come, their father was very ill. It was Alice, kneeling at the head of the bed after all the weary days of waiting, who recognized the death rattle; Alice who instantly ran out to get her mother, who had briefly moved next door to give vent to her grief.

Queen Victoria had clung to the belief that her husband was suffering only from influenza. She had refused to summon the Prince of Wales, angry with her son but also fearful that his arrival would set the patient back. She felt impatient at times. She had survived typhoid. Why could Albert not do the same? Could it be true what he said, that he did not cling to life? What could that mean when she and the nation needed him so desperately? What did it say about their marriage?

But for the last two weeks, she hardly left his side, and, though she knew she was no nurse, she did what she could. She was, she thought, courageous. Albert had so often blamed her for her lack of emotional control and her selfishness, but now, when it mattered, she did not weep or show despair. She tried to anticipate his wishes and do just what he wanted. She spoke to him in his native German and translated his words for others. She was courteous and considerate to the doctors. She saw all that Alice did and was impressed and grateful.

When the prince slapped her hand in irritation, she made excuses for him. When he complained that she was refusing to stay with him, she did not say that the doctors had ordered her to leave so that he could rest. When he walked unannounced into her dressing room one evening like a ghost, she was terrified, then took his hand and led him back to bed. When he became alarmed by his reflection in the big mirror and hallucinated that he was in a room at the old palace of Holyrood, she had the mirror lowered and the cot moved. When he was in delirium and failed to recognize her, she did not break down. Coming in to see him in the dawn glow on December 14, she was once again overwhelmed by his beauty. How terribly she loved him. What could life mean without him? When he looked on her with love that awful morning, she begged him for a kiss.

Exhausted by sleepless nights, weary of moving around the palace after her poor wandering tortured love, going through the dispatch boxes by day to do the essential business because she knew he would have wanted her to, Queen Victoria did not give up hope for a long time. But at last, on the night of December 14, she gave way. She fled into the next room and sat down on the floor for a moment in “mute despair.” Then, at Alice’s urgent summons, she ran back in and took the beloved hand. Already it was cold as stone. Albert took a few calm breaths. Then there was silence. “Oh, this is death!” Victoria cried, “I know it. I have seen it before.”

…

HE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT CAME AS A SHOCK TO THE NATION
. When the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral rang ominously out over nighttime London, and the telegraph wires began to sing, everyone outside Windsor Castle and the cabinet was taken unawares, if not exactly surprised.

Sudden death was a frequent visitor to Victorian families, and not just the underfed and overworked poor. The new sanitarians like Edwin Chad-wick documented how all classes suffered from air black with soot and water brown with sewage. The new statisticians like William Farr graphically recorded the spikes in mortality that occurred when epidemic cholera was added to endemic tuberculosis. The new serial novelists like Charles Dickens developed a wide palate of colorful death scenes.

The combination of high mortality and rising prosperity created a culture of death and an innovative funerary industry. Keen businessmen were quickly at the elbow of the weeping widow or the guilty heir, ready to lay on a funeral that would impress the neighbors. They could rapidly conjure up a huge, shining black hearse drawn by jet-black horses, their tall black plumes dancing, slowly trotting through the streets, escorted by hired mourners in black suits, black top hats, and black ribbons. A tiny, blond, black-clad boy, quite unrelated to the deceased, was the funeral parlor’s coup de grâce.

Thus when the nation heard of the death of the prince consort, it was primed to throw itself into an orgy of mourning. No expense was spared, no effort was enough. On the days immediately following the death, the streets of London were empty, with shops boarded up. All over the country, people and buildings were wreathed in black, shops sold out of black fabrics, and
textile mills were mobbed with orders. For weeks and months, clergymen gratified their sobbing congregations with sermons on the classic themes of memento mori: dust to dust; vanity, vanity, all is vanity; death the great leveler; and so on and so forth. Eulogies to the lost prince gushed forth from cabinet ministers and members of parliament, from bishops in the pulpit, from newspaper men in black-bordered editorials, from poets eager to capitalize on the publishing successes of Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s book-length
In Memoriam
.