Shooting Victoria (51 page)

As Sir Charles Dilke's republican tour gathered steam, then, Victoria had a host of reasons to seclude herself. If her prime minister was to bring her out again and restore her to public favor, he needed a miracle.

He got two: a bacillus, and an unruly boy.

Salmonella typhi
was above class discrimination: it bred in the foul drains of the rich as well as the cesspits of the poor. All agreed that
Salmonella typhi
had killed the Prince Consort ten years before. Then, the bacillus apparently had its origin in the notorious pools of filth under Windsor Castle. The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, traveled north to drink his contaminated water, to the country estate of Lord Jonesborough near Scarborough, which the Prince and Princess visited in early November 1871. Many besides Bertie became ill, several seriously, including the Earl of Chesterfield and one of the Prince's grooms. It took several weeks before it became clear that the illness was serious: on November 22, the royal doctors announced to the world that the Prince was suffering from typhoid fever. They were at first optimistic. But their regular telegraphed reports from Sandringham—published in every newspaper—became increasingly alarming. The health of the Prince quickly became the national obsession, and as he seemingly neared death, he gained an overwhelming and unprecedented public sympathy.

On 29 November, Victoria hurried from Balmoral to Sandringham. Two days later, the Earl of Chesterfield died; Bertie's groom was to die as well. As his fever worsened, Bertie began to babble deliriously. At thirty, the pleasure-loving prince had already accumulated more than his fair share of royal secrets, and his fevered revelations convinced the doctors that his wife had best be kept from the room. When she did come to him, in the audacity of his illness he accused
her
of infidelity. At the beginning of December, he seemed to improve, and Victoria returned to Windsor. Within a week, however, he was worse than ever. In tears she returned to what seemed his deathbed. Sandringham became so overfull with royals that two of Bertie's sisters had to share a bed. Messages of support flooded in from all corners of the kingdom, as well as many prescribing “remedies of the most mad kind.” The Queen noticed and was grateful, writing in her journal “The feeling shown by the whole nation is quite marvellous and most touching and striking, showing how really sound and truly loyal the people really are.”

On the eleventh, the doctors told Victoria to expect the end that night. But the Prince survived that day in a raving delirium: deluded that he was now king, he began barking royal orders; he whistled, sang, shouted; he hurled pillows across the room. Victoria kept watch over him from behind a screen. The thirteenth was the worst day at all; and at one point on that day, Victoria and her daughter Alice agreed that “there can be no hope.” Victoria realized with horror that her eldest son would probably die on December 14, ten years to the very day after his father.

But she was wrong. On the fourteenth the fever abated, and Bertie had periods of quiet rest. The next day, he was able to say to his mother calmly and coherently “Oh! Dear Mama, I am so glad to see you. Have you been here all this time?” Not long after this, he asked for a glass of Bass's beer.

The prince's recovery was a renewal on every level. About Bertie himself, according to his mother, “there is something quite
different which I can't exactly express. It is like a new life.…” The Princess of Wales was never happier; she and the Prince were inseparable as he recovered. And Victoria's own bond with her son intensified; it was as if she needed his near-death to understand his value to her. He was now her “Beloved Child,” without qualifications. And outside the walls of Sandringham, the relationship between the public and the royal family had altered utterly: the spirit of loyalty had become far stronger than it had been in a decade. The republican tide was quickly ebbing.

Charles Wentworth Dilke, second Baronet, became the chief victim of this sea change. In mid-November, as the
Salmonella typhi
bacillus worked quietly upon the Prince, Dilke continued his speaking tour. The great publicity accorded his Newcastle speech guaranteed that he had to deal with hecklers and scuffles during all his subsequent appearances, but in general he was well received. Then the Prince fell seriously ill. A meeting of constituents in Chelsea on 29 November turned into a riotous brawl between supporters and opponents. Two days after that, Dilke's appearance in Bolton precipitated an even worse riot; as he attempted to speak, royalists outside smashed the windows of the hall with bricks and pieces of iron; they soon burst into the hall and laid into the audience with bludgeons. Many were injured, and one man died. After that, Dilke turned down many appearances and made only a few, at which he backpedaled on his republicanism.

If Dilke was blindsided by the Prince's illness and recovery, his prime minister was overjoyed: the Prince had given Gladstone the perfect opportunity to deal with the “royalty question” once and for all. He had heard that the Princess of Wales desired a national day of thanksgiving for her husband's recovery. Gladstone agreed: a grand service at St. Paul's—with, more importantly, a splendid royal procession with Victoria and her son in an open carriage from palace to cathedral and back again—would do more than strengthen the public's newfound affection for Bertie; it would
also reintroduce the Queen to her people, and signal the end of her ten-years' seclusion. Armed with a substantial list of precedents—including the Thanksgiving in 1789 when George III recovered from madness—Gladstone visited the Queen at Windsor on 21 December to persuade her to go among her public.

The Queen refused. “Nothing could induce her to be a party to it,” Gladstone wrote. Her excuse was that religion should not be mixed with show; “such a display” she considered “false and hollow.” She really feared putting
herself
on display, of course. Gladstone gently argued that the Princess of Wales greatly desired a public thanksgiving. Victoria brushed this off: surely Alix would not insist upon it, given the Queen's reasons for refusal. But Alix
did
insist, writing to Victoria “the whole nation has taken such a public share in our sorrow, it has been so entirely one with us in our grief, that it may perhaps feel that it has a kind of claim to join with us now in a public and universal thanksgiving.” The Queen then agreed, grudgingly, and for the next few weeks she and her prime minister haggled about the details, Victoria at every turn attempting to minimize the ceremony, and Gladstone working to pull out every stop. She was livid when Gladstone planned to insert an announcement of her plans in the Queen's Speech: “it gives
too much
weight to it,” she complained, and ignores the possibility of “
her
being prevented from going by indisposition.” She wanted a half-hour service at St. Paul's; Gladstone wanted nothing less than an hour. The Queen wished to progress in “half-state”—without state carriages, state dress, or detachments of guards. Gladstone accepted this, under the conditions that the carriages remain open and the procession move at walking speed, so that the Queen would be well seen by all along the route. They haggled about the number of tickets for admission to the Cathedral, about the carriage in which the Speaker of the House would ride, about whether the Queen and the Prince of Wales would travel in the same or in different carriages, and about the route of the procession. Five days before what Victoria was calling “this dreadful affair at St. Paul's,”
her annoyance and anxiety burst out in a letter to Gladstone: “The Queen is looking with much alarm to the Ceremony of the 27
^th
—the fatigue & excitement of w
^h
she fears will be vy great & she has been g
^ty
annoyed at the constant new suggestions wh are being made.—It is tho' it was to be
merely a show
!”

But the show went on: the scaffolding and flags and bunting and illuminations and flower-decked triumphal arches went up all along the route. London prepared to welcome the Queen home.

At noon on 27 February, a cold, clear day, Napoleon III, ex-emperor of the French, stood with his wife Eugénie at an eastern window of Buckingham Palace; they were special guests of the Queen, their state of exile preventing their attendance at St. Paul's. The two gazed—wistfully, one assumes—upon the ocean of human beings roiling on the other side of the palace gates and stretching down the Mall. Out of the northeast gate of the Palace, a cortège of ten carriages—the last one carrying the Queen and the Prince of Wales
*
—was slowly plunging into that cheering, seething, screaming mass. It was the greatest gathering on the streets of London in a generation.

Victoria was ecstatic as she passed through what she estimated to be millions, with their “wonderful enthusiasm and astounding affectionate loyalty.” The white detailing of her black dress—miniver on her gown, white flowers on her bonnet—suggested the slightest thaw in her decade of mourning. The cheering seemed never to stop, nor did her enthusiastic response. Bertie, sitting across from her and still pale from his illness, felt it too: the energy of the crowd energized them, their reception “so gratifying that one could not feel tired.” At Temple Bar, the traditional entry to
the City, they stopped for the Lord Mayor's welcome. Victoria took her son's hand, pressed it, and held it up for the crowd. People cried, the Queen said; Bertie cried. Victoria admitted to a lump in her own throat. The service at St. Paul's, attended by the upper ten thousand,
*
was far less exciting for the Queen; it was stiflingly hot, and—though Victoria had won the argument with Gladstone and the service was shortened—still too long. Then there was the triumphant return to the palace by a northern route, past Newgate (“very dreary-looking,” wrote the Queen), up Holborn, down Oxford Street, through Hyde Park, where men and boys perched perilously on every available tree branch, as they had twenty years before at the opening of the Great Exhibition—down Constitution Hill—“the deafening cheering never ceasing for a minute”—and again through the northeast gate. Bertie, Alix, and their two sons then took their leave, but Victoria, with her youngest daughter Beatrice and her three other sons, climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the balcony for another round of vociferous cheers. “Could think and talk of little else,” she wrote in her journal, “but to-day's wonderful demonstration of loyalty and affection, from the very highest to the lowest. Felt tired by all the emotion, but it is a day that can never be forgotten.” What she had forgotten completely was her own abhorrence to ride in the first place, and the strenuous efforts of her prime minister to get her to show herself. She did afterwards write him, glowing about her reception and asking him to convey her gratitude to her subjects. But she could manage not a word of gratitude to Gladstone himself.

Victoria's triumph seemed complete. But there was more to come. The bacillus had done its work; now, it was the unruly boy's turn.

*
As it happens, Dickens's
Great Expectations
had just completed its serial publication in August 1861.

*
John McCafferty demonstrates that some among the Fenians indeed considered members of the British Royal family to be legitimate targets in achieving political ends: it was he who proposed in 1874 kidnapping the Prince of Wales in order to compel the British government to release all Fenian prisoners (Quinlivan and Rose 24).

*
The Metropolitan Police had been warned in detail about the attack the day before, and the then-sole commissioner Richard Mayne, now an old man of seventy-one, did little in response. Mortified by the blast, he offered his resignation. It was refused, but he likely never recovered from the shock and died in 1868. Jeremiah O'Sullivan escaped to the United States, and only one man, Michael Barrett, was found guilty for the explosion. Barrett was hanged outside Newgate on 26 May 1868, the last public execution in England. The elderly William Calcraft was executioner.

*
And carrying as well the Princess of Wales, Princess Beatrice, Albert Victor (Bertie's oldest son), and of course, on the rumble seat, John Brown in full highland dress.

*
The upper 11,876, to be exact, judging from the number of tickets issued. (Kuhn 155n.)

twenty

L
EAP
D
AY

N
ine days before the thanksgiving, Arthur O'Connor in a flash of insight realized what he had to do. On that cold mid-February Sunday, the seventeen-year-old was taking his favorite walk in Hyde Park along the banks of the Serpentine—far from his depressing home in the East London slums of Aldgate. His walk skirted that part of the park where the Crystal Palace had once stood—past, in other words, that part of London which had over the past decade become known as Albertopolis—the evergrowing collection of establishments endowed by the proceeds of the Exhibition of 1851, all of them sacred to the memory of the dead Prince Consort. Just south of the boy and visible through the winter trees were the hoardings surrounding what would become the grand, high-neogothic Albert Memorial—scheduled for unveiling in July. Across the road from that was the distinctively elliptical and domed Royal Albert Hall, which Victoria, overwhelmed with emotion, had opened on a bitterly cold day last
March. Adjoining the Hall were the gardens of the Horticultural Society, the southern limit of which was laid out for a new museum of natural history. And across from that was the South Kensington Museum, which would one day be known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Albertopolis was far from the only monument to the memory of the Prince Consort. Since his death, monuments to him had been erected through the length and breadth of the kingdom; even Dublin had its Albert statue. By Victoria's wishes, her husband had achieved something close to deification.