We Two: Victoria and Albert (92 page)

342
“Papa is much pleased
Ibid, pp. 292–293.

343
“One becomes so worn out
Dearest Child
p. 192.

343
“I really think those ladies
Dearest Child
p. 191.

343
“No father, no man
Ibid, p. 182. In this same letter, Queen Victoria notes that Alice has picked up on some things (presumably relating to sex and reproduction) and is beginning to dread marriage.

343
After Vicky wrote in disgust
Ibid, p. 205.

343
Weary of congratulating young ladies
Ibid, p. 269.

343
Victoria is not known to have
Beatrice, referred to in the family as “Baby” until she was at least five, was allowed to watch her father shave and cheek her mother at mealtimes. The Queen’s letters have many references to Baby’s darling new outfits and her cunning little sayings. One wonders how Alice, Helena, and Louise reacted to such favoritism.

343
In November 1857, they gazed
See the prince’s letter describing this tragic event that occurred at Claremont, to his uncle Leopold, Jagow, p.284.

344
Given the same advice
In her fascinating little book
(Queen Victoria. The Woman, the Monarchy, The People
(New York: Pantheon, 1990, p. 43), Dorothy Thompson relates this story, noting that it crops up a lot in the literature, mostly without attribution. Thompson apparently found the story in Barry St. John Neville’s
Life at the Court of Queen Victoria: Illustrated from the Collections of Lord Edward Pelham-Clinton, Master of the Household, with Selections from the Journal of Queen Victoria
(Salem, New Hampshire: Salem House, 1984, introduction, p. 13, no attribution).

344
As he once confided
Roger Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, citing the Royal Archives, p. 265.

345
If pregnancy was the price
Elizabeth Longford claims that Victoria told her daughter Vicky just after Prince Albert’s death that she bitterly regretted not having another child (Longford, pp. 389–390). Longford acknowledges that this is odd given the Queen’s “violent attitude toward childbearing.” My interpretation would be that Victoria wished that, in their final years together, she and her husband had enjoyed conjugal relations, even at the risk of another pregnancy.

345
Her feelings for him were
Dearest Mama
, p. 106.

345
I and the girls
Dearest Child
p. 131–139.

Chapter 27:
“I DO NOT CLING TO LIFE AS YOU DO”

346
“To my imagination it appears
Letter to King Frederick William II of Prussia, Jagow p. 81.

347
“God have mercy on us!”
Woodham-Smith, p. 402 and note p. 468, quoting
Memoirs
of Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 1888, vol. IV p. 55.

347
Such remarks would make
Dearest Mama
, p. 30.

348
Prince Albert aged so fast
When it became clear to Queen Victoria that she must intervene, it was too late. On December 7, 1861, Queen Victoria talked with doctors Clark and Jenner “over what could have caused” her husband’s illness. “Great worry and far too hard work for long!” she concluded.
“That must
be stopped” (Woodham-Smith, p. 425).

348
“Were there not so many things
Jagow, p. 347.

350
Gastric problems troubled Albert
In
Uncrowned King
, Stanley Weintraub suggests that Prince Albert had stomach cancer, and Christopher Hibbert in his biography of Queen Victoria hints at the same thing. Since Queen Victoria refused to allow an autopsy on her husband’s body, it is impossible to substantiate this hypothesis.

351
Her diagnosis was
Two weeks before her husband died, Queen Victoria was writing to her daughter in Berlin: “I can begin by saying that dear Papa is in reality much better—only so much reduced and as usual desponding as men really only are—when unwell” (Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 153).

352
On one of his visits to London
Measles is highly contagious but dangerous mainly to children who are undernourished and to adults who have never acquired any immunity. In 1861 almost everybody in Europe contracted measles in early childhood and was thereafter immune, with mothers conferring initial immunity on their infants up to about the age of one. It is possible that royal persons were less exposed to common childhood ailments like measles and thus did not acquire immunity. In the nineteenth century, measles was often confused with the less serious rubella (German measles). That Prince Louis was able to travel to England when he had measles and then infected only his future mother-in-law and one of her children seems unlikely. That Queen Victoria claimed she caught measles twice is another indication that on at least one occasion she came down with rubella, not measles.

352
“You say no one is perfect
Dearest Child
p. 354.

353
In his diary he wrote in June
Woodham-Smith, p. 414.

354
Victoria had the most fun ever
Victoria published an account of these “Great Expeditions” in her first volume of Highland memoirs. See David Duff,
Victoria in the Highlands
, pp. 172–192.

355
On his occasional meetings
Historians have had little good to say about King Pedro, or his father.

355
“The death of poor, good Pedro
Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, p. 264.

355
Queen Victoria confided to her diary
Jagow, p. 370.

355
“If you were to try and deny it
I paraphrase here the account of the letter given by Cecil Woodham-Smith, pp. 416–417, the only one with quotations. The full text of this letter has never been published.

357
He was suffering from typhoid fever
According to the death certificate made out by his eldest son, the prince consort contracted the typhoid fever that killed him on November 22. This date was no doubt supplied by one of his attendant physicians, Dr William Jenner. Such dates were necessarily approximate at a time when blood tests for pathogens were unknown. It seems far from unlikely that the prince in fact contracted typhoid some weeks earlier, soon after his return to Windsor Castle. If so, the news of the deaths of Pedro and Ferdinand, ironically from typhoid, and the letter from Stockmar came when the prince consort was already suffering from the disease that would kill him. Well or sick, the prince would certainly have reacted with deep disappointment and rage to the news of Bertie’s dalliance with Nellie Clifden. But if Albert’s reaction to his son’s fall from grace has always
seemed so extreme, it may have been in no small part because he was suffering the effects of a life-threatening fever. The exploit of the Prince of Wales clearly exacerbated his father’s mental disarray. But Bertie was not responsible for his father’s death, as Queen Victoria fervently believed for many years.

359
Though he was a fervent advocate
Let me cite just two instances of the prince consort’s work as a sanitarian. At the Great Exhibition, Albert constructed in Hyde Park model working-class houses that featured indoor plumbing. At this time, a water closet and running water were considered to be luxuries. When Florence Nightingale returned from the Crimea in 1856, she was invited to stay with the Queen and the prince at Balmoral and had long conversations with them about how and why so many men had died of infectious disease in the recent war. At the prince’s strong recommendation, the Queen authorized a royal commission to examine the issues. The resulting report, that Nightingale supervised and wrote, was a major step toward protecting the lives of British soldiers.

359
By December 1
The death of the prince consort was an important and dramatic event. It was observed by a number of people, several of whom left detailed accounts of what they had seen. Many letters—between the Queen and her various relatives, between the Queen and Lord Palmerston, between Palmerston and Sir George Phipps—are extant, and many have been published. Every book on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert gives an account of the prince’s death. I have relied especially on those by Woodham-Smith, Longford, and Fulford. Victoria continued to write her journal every day until December 13. The journal started up again after two weeks. In 1872, after several unsuccessful attempts, the Queen was finally able to give her own account of her husband’s last days, which, she says, were engraved upon her memory.

360
“Albert is a little rheumatic
This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from
The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1837–1861
, ed. Benson and Esher, vol. III, pp. 468–471.

361
“You did wrong,” he commented
Longford, p. 374.

361
This was especially true
This was not the view of contemporaries. Lord Clarendon famously remarked that Sir James Clark and Sir Henry Holland could not be trusted to look after a sick cat. Florence Nightingale remarks in her private papers that the prince consort could have been saved had he received proper nursing.

Chapter 28:
MOURNING A PRINCE

365
Dissatisfied by such ephemeral tributes
For my discussion here and below of the memorials and monuments erected by the nation, I am indebted to
The Cult of the Prince Consort
by Elisabeth Darby and Nicola Smith, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.

365
the Earl of Oxford exclaimed
Duff,
Victoria and Albert, p. 297
, citing Jerrold. Other sources ascribe this anecdote to the Earl of Oxford.

367
In a private conversation
Lytton Strachey,
Queen Victoria
, p. 186, citing the 1886 memoir of his years as Prussia’s representative in London, 1852–1864, by Carl Friedrich Graf Vitzhum von Eckstadt.

368
This was the view
“If there comes a real collision between the Queen and the House of Commons,” wrote Mary Ponsonby in 1878 to her husband, who was then Queen Victoria’s private secretary, “it is quite possible she would turn restive … and then her reign will end in a fiasco or she prepares one for the Prince of Wales; for I do think in a tussle of that sort, and I do hope and pray it should be so, that the People win the day”
Mary Ponsonby
, pp. 144–145.

368
Jane Ely and Jane Churchill
Duff,
Victoria and Albert
, p. 19.

368
“I feel right well”
“Biographical Sketch” of his father by Ernest Stockmar, introduction to
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. 1, p. xcviii.

368
Albert had been dearer to him
Fulford,
The Prince Consort, p. 273
.

370
“Oh! That boy
Dearest Mama
, p. 30.

373
Then she took to sleeping
The Princess Royal (Vicky) wrote to her husband from Osborne in March 1862: “Mama is dreadfully sad … always sleeps with Papa’s coat over her and his dear red dressing gown beside and some of his clothes in her bed! … [She is] as much in love with Papa as though she had married him yesterday … she feels the same as your little Fräuchen … and is always consumed with longing for her husband” (Hibbert,
Queen Victoria: A Personal History
, New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 271).

373
“I never dreamt
Dearest Mama
, p. 23.

373
“I am alas! not old
Nina C. Epton,
Victoria and Her Daughters
, New York: Norton, 1971, p. 102.

373
Even in her first letter
Letters of Queen Victoria
, vol. iii, p. 473.

374
The loneliness and longing
Queen Victoria, in a letter to her daughter when Vicky was in despair over the death of her husband, volunteered that she had once been tempted “to put an end to my life
here
, but a
voice
told me for
His
sake—no! Still Endure.” Longford, p. 426, citing Kronberg Letters, October 2, 1888.