A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Read online

  For the first half of December the rain had come down in torrents, but now in the final days before Christmas fine, cold weather and a sharp frost had arrived and would persist right through the holiday. From 5 p.m. on the afternoon of the 20th it had begun snowing and continued till midnight, the snow piling in drifts around the castle, as it rose up like a fairytale citadel in the dazzling white of the surrounding landscape. Prince Albert had always loved ‘the dear Christmas Eve’ and took great pleasure in his children’s ‘happy wonder at the German Christmas tree and its radiant candles’.6 Christmas was a profoundly nostalgic time for him, reminding him of those he had spent with his brother as children. Separated from the home at Coburg that he so loved, he now had to ‘seek in the children an echo of what Ernest and I were in the old time’, as he mused to his stepmother.7 By 1860 he and Queen Victoria had nine children, ranging from Vicky (aged twenty) to Beatrice the youngest, who was only three. Yet already, young though they were, the royal children had begun to fly the nest. Vicky, Albert’s much-adored favourite, had been married at seventeen to the Crown Prince of Prussia, the first stage in a personal project nurtured by her parents to secure a united, democratic Germany under Prussian leadership. Already the mother of two children, Vicky was now resigned to having to spend Christmas isolated from her family at her palace in Berlin. Her sister Alice – Victoria and Albert’s third child and second daughter – would be the next to marry. At the end of November she had become engaged to Prince Louis of Hesse; he was rather dull, but Alice had fortunately fallen in love with him, and Louis was visiting Windsor that Christmas in anticipation of their marriage in a year or so’s time. Victoria and Albert had similar plans for their son and heir Albert Edward, better known as Bertie in the family, who had just returned from an official tour – his first on their behalf – to Canada and the USA. He had acquitted himself well, demonstrating his popular touch and natural social skills, although at a dance in his honour at Pike’s Opera House in Cincinnati he had looked with rather too much pleasure on the ‘vast array of beauties’ lined up for him.8 Such reports discomfited his parents; Bertie must be married off, and soon, in Albert’s view.

  It was an unusually large family gathering that year. The days before Christmas were full of laughter and activity as the family was reunited with Affie (Prince Alfred) who, having joined the navy at the age of only twelve, was home from sea, much to his mother’s delight. Everyone busied themselves with present-wrapping in between frequent trips down the hill to skate on the frozen pond on the Slopes below the north-east side of the castle. On the 23rd Victoria was delighted to see that the severe frost persisted. Despite the freezing weather, everyone eagerly walked down to the pond again to skate, returning for an intimate family supper, after which, like any ordinary family, ‘albums were looked at and Albert played at chess with Affie’.9

  That particular Christmas, John Delane, editor of The Times, was fortunate to receive an insider’s view of the royal family at their leisure, thanks to his friend at court, Lord Torrington – ‘that arch gossip of gossips’.10 Torrington had been a permanent lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria since 1859 and, in a private joke with Delane, with whom he frequently corresponded, described himself as ‘your Windsor special’.11 In letters written that Christmas to Delane, Torrington vividly captured the happy and relaxed atmosphere at Windsor: how he played billiards with the two young princes, Arthur and Alfred, and had sat and chatted informally with the Queen and Prince Albert. On Christmas Eve he had ventured down to the castle’s cavernous kitchens to see the great baron of beef – all 360 pounds in weight – that was being cooked on a huge spit with great iron chains, constantly attended by four men.12 Elsewhere in the vast Windsor kitchen with its twelve ranges, other huge fires had roasts suspended in front of them – one alone had fifty turkeys. Yet everywhere the greatest calm and order prevailed among the kitchen’s legion of white-jacketed and white-capped cooks.

  Everyone was delighted to wake on the 24th to ‘true Xmas weather, snow on the ground and sharp frost’, as Victoria recorded. In the heart of his family and away from the limelight of public scrutiny and onerous official duty, Prince Albert took an almost childish delight in the pleasures of the Christmas season. In the morning he and the young princes went out for some invigorating shooting, while the others once more went down to the skating pond. The ice lured them all back in the afternoon to enjoy a game of ice-hockey, in which Victoria was delighted to see that the shy and nervous Louis ‘joined with great spirit’. Back in their apartments after 4 p.m. as the dark of Christmas Eve drew in, the family set about arranging their many gifts to each other on the present tables. It was, recalled Victoria, ‘most bewildering’ sorting them all out, but with her husband’s ‘great indefatigability’ they succeeded.13

  At 6 p.m. everyone in the royal household gathered in the Oak Room for the exchange of presents. Here they were greeted by the Queen and Prince Albert standing by a large table covered with a white damask cloth, in the middle of which stood a decorated fir tree surrounded by presents and handwritten cards for them. In addition, three artificial fir trees about eight feet in height had been specially put in place in each of the Queen’s three private sitting rooms – one each for herself, the Prince and the Duchess of Kent – with another tree for the children in the nursery. Smaller fir trees imported specially from Prince Albert’s childhood home at Coburg were on display elsewhere in the castle.14 The chandeliers had to be taken down specially to accommodate the larger ornamental trees, which were securely suspended from the ceiling, their bases resting on the table. The ten rows of symmetrical branches of these trees were decorated with edible fancies: sweetmeats, little cakes, fancy French bonbons, gilt walnuts – and gingerbreads whose delicious aroma filled the air – the effect completed with coloured ribbons and wax tapers and a frosting of artificial snow and icicles. At each tree-top stood a Christmas angel of Nuremberg glass, its outstretched wings holding a wreath in each hand.

  Lord Torrington watched as the family exchanged their presents. The largest drawing room was like an Aladdin’s cave, ‘fitted up with everything that was handsome, various, and in good taste’, he wrote. ‘Each member gave a present to one another, so that, including the Prince Louis of Hesse and the Duchess of Kent, [everyone] gave and received thirteen presents.’ It was a most joyful sight, none more so than that of ten-year-old Prince Arthur – ‘the flower of the flock’ in Torrington’s opinion – who ‘speedily got into a volunteer uniform, which, with endless other things, including a little rifle, fell to his lot, took a pot-shot at his papa, and then presented arms’. Torrington could not help noticing how carefully chosen all the presents were, how ‘beautiful in taste and suited to the receiver’. Those chosen by the children for their parents were selected with great care, so that ‘even the Queen might find use for them’. Victoria was delighted with the gift of a bracelet containing small hand-coloured photographs of Louis and Alice. ‘All the dear children worked me something,’ she recorded with delight in her journal.15

  After the family had exchanged their own presents, the Queen handed out gifts to the royal household. Torrington wondered whether the Prince Consort had ‘had a quiet joke in his mind’ in the selection of somewhat quirky presents for gentlemen members of the household – Charles Phipps (Keeper of Prince Albert’s Privy Purse), Thomas Biddulph (Master of the Queen’s Household), General Charles Grey (Prince Albert’s Private Secretary), and General Bruce (Governor to the Prince of Wales):

  Phipps had salt cellars resting on little fish with their mouths open, Biddulph a bread basket, Grey a sugar basin, and Bruce a claret jug; but at any rate, the four articles were somewhat true emblems of the loaves and fishes. The parties concerned have not observed the possible joke, nor have I suggested the idea.16

  Torrington himself was delighted to receive ‘a supply of studs, sleeve buttons, and waistcoat ditto, handsome, plain gold; a pocket-book’. In addition, everyone was presented with ‘a large cake of Nur
emburg gingerbread’. That day at Windsor, he confided to Delane, he had never seen ‘more real happiness than the scene of the mother and all her children’. Even Prince Albert, notorious for his reserve, had ‘lost his stiffness’ and had allowed himself to rest and relax for once. All in all, ‘your Windsor special had much cheerful and friendly conversation with them both’. It was, he concluded, ‘a sight I should have liked you to have seen’. The Queen concurred in her journal that evening: ‘As usual such a merry happy night with all the Children, and not the least happy, dear Alice and Louis.’17

  On Christmas Day the family awoke to intense cold of minus two degrees Centigrade and an icy fog hanging across Windsor Home Park. ‘The windows were frozen, the trees all white with frost,’ wrote the Queen. After breakfast everyone gathered round to look at all the unwrapped presents laid out round the Christmas trees on the tables. Then once more they went down to the pond to skate. It was such a wonderful fine day, the church bells echoing Christmas joy across the crisp morning air, as the Queen recalled. The sound made ‘such a beautiful effect’ as they walked down the hill to St George’s Chapel in the Lower Ward for morning service.18

  Christmas Dinner was a grand affair, once more enjoyed by the entire royal household. ‘How I live to tell the tale I don’t know,’ Torrington told Delane, such was the vast banquet placed before them, the centrepiece of which was the great baron of beef he had seen cooking the previous day, surrounded by dozens of capons, turkeys, pea-hens and Cochin China pullets. The two youngest children, Beatrice and Leopold, had been allowed down from the nursery to join the family for dessert, and after lunch Prince Albert played happily with his little daughter, who had brought some joy back into his life after the departure of Vicky – swinging her back and forth in a large table napkin to shrieks of delight.19 Altogether it was a most ‘jolly’ day of relaxed informal conversation with the Queen and Prince Albert and family games of chess, pool and billiards.20

  On Boxing Day, Prince Albert again took his sons out shooting while the Queen, Prince Louis and Princess Alice and the girls went down the hill to skate. Snow fell all that night and the following day, the 27th. As the candles on the Christmas tree were lit for the last time in the drawing room at 7 p.m. (all the trees in the royal apartments would be lit up again on New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night), everyone gathered to dine ‘en famille’. ‘All were very gay,’ the Queen recalled, ‘and telling many stories.’21 The happiness and informality of that memorable Christmas continued into the 28th, when everyone piled into sledges and took one last turn across the snowscape of Windsor Home Park before the time came to bid farewell to Prince Louis.

  No one who was at Windsor that Christmas of 1860 could have failed to be impressed and moved by the conviviality of the British royal family at home. ‘Even as in a public bazaar, where people jostle one another, so lords, grooms, Queen, and princes laughed and talked, forgot to bow, and freely turned their backs on one another,’ Torrington told Delane. ‘Little princesses, who on ordinary occasions dare hardly to look at a gentleman-in-waiting, in the happiest manner showed each person they could lay hands on the treasures they had received.’22

  For Torrington, as for the vast majority of the British people, the royal family basked in a halo of sentimentality that reflected the affection that it was now increasingly enjoying as the model British family. No matter that the aristocracy had persisted in disliking Prince Albert and what they perceived as his disdainful and reserved German manner; he and Victoria – the virtuous and devoted couple with their nine pretty children – were idolised by the respectable classes as the epitome of the reassuringly bourgeois, Victorian domestic ideal. More importantly, their happy married life was confirmation of the stability and continuity of the British monarchy itself as a working monarchy, focused on the family and with pride in its material and social achievements. ‘The more I see of the Royal domestic life, the more I am in admiration of it,’ General Grey had written in 1849. He was convinced that ‘so pure and exemplary a Court never before existed’.23 Two years later the youthful Eleanor Stanley, who had been in waiting at Windsor that Christmas, had told her parents, ‘you can’t think how simple and happy all the Royalty looked, just like any other family, of the most united and domestic tastes’.24 This reputation for informal happy domesticity was one that Prince Albert had worked hard to establish and was determined to maintain, as the archetypal paterfamilias. Torrington’s admiration was much the same in 1860. There was no doubting the esteem in which Victoria and Albert were held, he told Delane. He had never seen ‘a more agreeable sight’ that Christmas: ‘It was royalty putting aside its state and becoming in words, acts, and deeds one of ourselves, no forms and not a vestige of ceremony.’25

  At the end of that year the royal family was at the height of its popularity, at a time of political stability and economic progress in Britain. After riding out much hostility in the early years of his marriage and a storm of controversy over his perceived meddling in foreign affairs during the Crimean War of 1854–6, Prince Albert was finally beginning to receive some grudging acknowledgement for his many contributions to the cultural, scientific and intellectual life of the country, for the efficient way in which he conducted official business and for the strict moral code he maintained in his family life.

  Victoria herself had enjoyed twenty years of happy marriage, secure in her husband’s love and fidelity. That in itself was a rarity, in an age when princesses had little choice in their life partners and were too often consigned to loveless marriages of dynastic necessity. For Britain’s queen adored her husband with a fierce and unquestioning devotion that none dared criticise and nothing could dim. Quite simply, he was all in all to her: surrogate father, husband, best friend, wise counsel, amanuensis and teacher – King in all but name. And, thanks to his influence, the British monarchy had been reinvigorated under its queen as a democratic and moral example for a new age that had at last divorced itself from the lingering reputation of the unpopular Hanoverians.

  As the Christmas holiday drew to a close and the members of the royal household dispersed and returned to their duties, the Queen and her husband settled down to watch the last hours of 1860 turn, Victoria as always confiding it all in meticulous detail to her journal:

  Dearest Albert and I took leave of the old year and wished each other joy of the new, at 12, before going to bed. I felt much moved, so anxious for the future, that no War should come, and fear for the state of Europe. My precious Husband cheered me and held me in his dear arms saying we must have trust, and we must believe that God will protect us.26

  God had indeed protected them; their children had all survived infancy, confirmation in itself, as Lady Lytton observed, of the ‘numberless instances of perfect awful, spotless prosperity’ that had blessed the royal family till now, in an age when around one in five children died in infancy.27 Victoria and Albert had yet to endure the anguish, at first hand, of close family bereavements. Death was still a stranger to them; it had yet to cast its shadow over the grey stone battlements of Windsor.

  Part One

  Albert the Good

  Chapter One

  ‘The Treadmill of Never-Ending Business’

  At the age of only eleven, the precocious Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had already planned his future. ‘I intend,’ he confided in his diary, ‘to train myself to be a good and useful man.’1It was a noble, if exacting aspiration for one so young, but one that, as husband of Queen Victoria, he would more than fulfil in his years of devoted service to the British throne and its people.

  He had been born three months after his cousin Princess Victoria, on 26 August 1819, and was delivered by the same German midwife – Charlotte Heidenreich von-Siebold – at the Schloss Rosenau, four miles from Coburg. The second son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and his wife Louise (of the rather more wealthy and prestigious house of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg), Albert was very close to his older brother Ernst.2Their
s was an idyllic and harmonious childhood, spent sharing a hedonistic love of nature during their summers at the Schloss Rosenau on the edge of the ancient Thuringian forest. Here they spent their time walking, hunting, shooting and fencing, as well as indulging their fascination with science and nature in a passion for collecting specimens. Both boys were trained in musical skills by their father, Albert becoming an accomplished pianist and organist as well as a fine singer and talented composer. He was always at his most self-expressive when playing the organ; music, his greatest love, providing a conduit for the reflective and melancholic side of his nature. It was a refuge for the poetical streak in him, which rarely found an outlet in his public life and which in adulthood was all too soon overwhelmed by responsibility. Fearful of strangers and prone to outbursts of tears, Albert had had his young life marred by the collapse of his parents’ marriage in 1824. His philandering father, who had never attempted to conceal his extramarital affairs, had abandoned Albert’s young and vulnerable mother Louise to long periods of solitude while he went out shooting, hunting and womanising. When Louise later sought consolation elsewhere, he banished her from their home – and from their two sons. Albert was only five. Louise remarried, but died of cancer six years later in 1831, without ever seeing her boys again.

  The loss of his mother affected Prince Albert deeply. His diffidence and insecurity manifested themselves in later life in a compulsion to be controlling over others; more significantly, his father’s libidinous character and his mother’s flirtations (which prompted later unproven rumours of Louise’s promiscuity and Albert’s illegitimacy) instilled in him a pathological horror of sexual licence and a fear of the seductive power of women.3The path of duty and usefulness was a far safer one and he expected life to be a ‘hard school’, where pleasure came second.4With this in mind, at the age of fourteen the young and idealistic prince established his own exacting curriculum of study: nine hours a day of ancient and modern history, theology, translation from Latin, geography, English, mathematics, logic, music and drawing – all overseen by one of the most formative influences in his early life, his tutor Herr Christoph Florschütz.