Sons, Servants and Statesmen (30 page)

A less amenable employee, particularly an eminent physician aged almost fifty, might have reacted angrily to such conditions, but Reid treated the business light-heartedly. He posted ‘the Queen’s Regulations’ to Susan, who fortunately found them as amusing as he did. They knew that an elderly lady of eighty deserved to be treated lightly in her declining years, and there was nothing to be gained by upsetting her and making a fuss about something they had expected anyway. She might be a demanding and authoritarian employer, but at heart a kindly one.

The wedding took place at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, on 28 November. The Queen did not herself attend, but the guests of honour included her daughters the Princesses Helena, Louise and Beatrice. So many members of the royal household and staff were there that the Queen, who remained behind at Windsor, asked with some anxiety, ‘And who shall bring me my tea?’
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Her wedding present to the couple was a box of silver knives, engraved with the family crest, while Susan was given a diamond brooch inscribed with the royal cypher ‘V.R.I.’, an Indian shawl and a signed photograph of the Queen.

As the man upon whom Queen Victoria relied more than any other during her last years, it was not surprising that Reid played a major role in the drama which surrounded her declining days and death.

By the time she went to Osborne House for Christmas 1900, those closest to her were aware that her health had been declining since the autumn, when she had not been quite herself. With hindsight, some must have wondered if – unthinkable though it must have seemed – their apparently immortal Majesty would ever return to the English mainland alive. Canon Boyd Carpenter was invited to preach at a short service for her on the last Sunday of the century, 30 December, which was held in the drawing-room, with Princess Beatrice playing the harmonium. Afterwards he had a conversation with the Queen, and was encouraged that she spoke of hoping to go to Cimiez in the spring. She was not well, he realised, but seemed less depressed than when he saw her earlier in the month.
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On 13 January 1901 Reid noticed that she ‘was rather childish and apathetic’.
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The next day she officially received Field Marshal Roberts, who had commanded the British armies in the Boer War. It was to be her last official duty as Queen.

Next day, Professor Hermann Pagenstecher, a German ophthalmic doctor at the London Eye Hospital, examined the Queen’s eyes for cataracts and confirmed Reid’s prognosis that, far more importantly than the cataract condition, she was experiencing ‘cerebral degeneration’, or was in imminent danger of suffering a stroke. Her disposition had altered, and little irritations such as unnecessary noise, or bells not answered quickly enough, had now ceased to irritate her. The royal schedule for the next few weeks included a spring holiday for the Queen at the Excelsior Regina Hotel at Cimiez, but Bigge discussed the matter with Reid and prudently cancelled their accommodation with the hotel management, enclosing a cheque to the sum of £800 for costs already incurred.
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On 16 January the Queen’s maids were unable to rouse their mistress. For the first time in his life, Reid went to her bedroom to see her. In the past she had never let her physicians see her in this most private of rooms; it had been the duty of her maids to administer all her medicines and draughts. He decided she was breathing normally and appeared in no immediate distress, though it astonished him to see how small and vulnerable the woman who was titular head of almost a quarter of the world looked at home. She remained in bed the entire day, the first time Reid could remember such a thing happening. Her dressers were summoned to help her rise at around 6 p.m., and she was wheeled into the sitting-room next to her bedroom. When she called for Reid about one and a half hours later, he found her very dazed and confused.

Sir Francis Laking, Physician-in-Ordinary and Surgeon Apothecary to the Prince of Wales, was also at Osborne, sent by the Prince to report on his mother’s health. The Prince’s high opinion of Laking was not shared by Reid, and only the previous month the Queen had refused to let Laking examine her. As both men went in to dinner that night, Laking said that he had spent forty-five minutes with Her Majesty and considered she did not seem ‘too bad’.

Reid suspected that the Queen had summoned what remaining strength she had to put on a show for the ‘outsider’, and also that Laking was going to give the Prince of Wales a falsely optimistic report on his mother’s health – the kind of report he wanted to receive. After fifty-nine years as heir to the throne, perhaps he found it impossible to believe that the long-dreaded time was about to come. Anxious to ensure the future King had an accurate assessment of his mother’s condition, that evening Reid visited her again, found her just as confused as she had been before, and wrote a report to the Prince which he hoped would be believed, in preference to any messages from Laking.

Throughout the remaining few days – the last of the Queen’s life – Reid found himself more or less in the position of a headmaster, with Osborne being his school. He had been asked by Emperor William at Berlin to keep him informed in the case of any sudden decline in his grandmother’s health, and so he telegraphed to him to warn him that the Queen’s health gave cause for concern. After he sent the telegram it occurred to him that the princesses, or ‘the petticoats’, would hold him responsible for the arrival of their nephew, about whose presence they had such mixed feelings. Reid’s conscience was salved only when he found that the Emperor had been told of the Queen’s condition by the Duke of Connaught and by Baron Hermann von Eckhardstein at the German Embassy, and the Emperor had left for England with Reid’s telegram lying unopened on his desk.

Reid also had to be involved in drafting and issuing regular bulletins to the public on the state of the Queen’s health, preparing them for the worst. It fell to him to impress on the Prince of Wales the severity of the situation and to advise him that it would be necessary to alter his plans to go to his beloved Sandringham and come instead to Osborne, that island home with few, if any, happy memories for him. In addition, Reid was still expected to carry out his medical duties, which now included sitting up with the dying Queen and giving her regular oxygen throughout the night hours, though at least he could share this duty with Sir Richard Powell, the Queen’s heart and lung specialist.

In the diary where he was keeping a careful chronicle of events as they occurred, he noted with some bitterness the absence of the Queen’s daughters. While neither he nor Powell called for them, it seemed to him rather uncaring that they did not appear during the night and enquire about their mother’s condition. Even after nearly twenty years of royal service, he still underestimated their timidity and the awe in which these middle-aged ladies held their formidable parent.

He was never in any doubt that she appreciated the severity of her condition and was frustrated at being physically and mentally incapable of working. On 19 January he and Powell visited her in bed in the evening, but she asked the latter to leave and turned to Reid, telling him weakly that ‘I still have a few things to settle.’ She reassured him that she had already arranged most things, but she needed to live a little longer to do those which were still left.
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This, he knew, was probably the last royal command – if it could be interpreted as such – which she would ever give.

For the next three days, as royal relations converged on Osborne House and eager journalists waited outside, Reid kept a careful eye on his patient and helped to write the regular bulletins which had to be issued to the press and public, carefully worded in order to prepare them for the inevitable. Towards the middle of the afternoon on 22 January 1901 he knew that the final stage had arrived, and family members, doctors and clergymen gathered around the bed of the unconscious woman, the right side of her face slightly flattened after a minor stroke. Emperor William II, her eldest grandchild and the one who, though he had often exasperated her, always held her in special affection, supported her with his right arm. It was indeed at considerable discomfort to himself, as his deformed and almost lifeless left arm was incapable of such a function.

At 4 p.m. Reid and his colleagues wrote what was to be the final bulletin during Victoria’s lifetime: ‘The Queen is slowly sinking.’ The end came two and a half hours later.

After a family service on the following day, Reid went to the Queen’s room where her body lay, to find a rather less than welcome visitor. Emil Fuchs, a Viennese painter and sculptor working in Berlin, had been invited by Emperor William to make a death mask of the Queen. Her daughters were aghast at what they considered this uncalled-for desecration of their mother’s body. No instructions had been left requesting such a move, and the Emperor had not thought to consult them first. Now King, Edward VII was contacted by telephone and asked to veto the move, which he promptly did, though he allowed Sir Hubert Herkomer to paint a deathbed portrait of her. Reid instructed the dressers to ensure that Her Majesty’s body was not left alone for a moment.

Two days later, in accordance with the instructions she had written in December 1897 and left to be opened by her dressers after her death, Reid had her body transferred from her deathbed to her coffin, in the bedroom in which she had died. A series of coffins, fitting one inside another, had been ordered. The Queen’s Chief Dresser and Dr Reid’s assistant, Mrs Tuck, read the doctor a set of instructions with which the Queen had entrusted her regarding the items she wanted to be interred in the innermost coffin, some of which were not to be seen by any member of the family. Among the items specified were rings, bracelets and lockets, the Prince Consort’s dressing gown, an alabaster cast of his hand and relics of the family’s childhoods. Once the wedding veil had been placed over the Queen’s face and upper body, now dressed in a white silk robe and the Order of the Garter, Reid placed in her left hand a photograph of John Brown. In a sheet of tissue paper he folded a lock of Brown’s hair set in a case and concealed it under a corsage of flowers which the King’s Consort, now Queen Alexandra, had laid on the body after it had been placed in the shell. To these, Reid added some additional photographs and letters between the Queen and Brown.
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Though there were subsequent last viewings of the Queen’s body by family and court members, the John Brown items remained undisturbed and unseen until the outer coffin lid was screwed down.

The King led various members of his family through the room, followed by members of the household and the servants, to take their final leave of her. The last to be summoned was the Munshi, whom the King loathed. Ironically, he could thus claim a special privilege in that he became the last person to see Her Majesty before the coffin was closed and the lid screwed down. After the final farewells, the bedroom was sealed with bronze gates, to remain a shrine for half a century.

The King ordered the Munshi to destroy all the letters written to him by Queen Victoria. As if to witness the destruction, Queen Alexandra and Princess Beatrice were summoned to attend the bonfire at the Munshi’s home at Windsor, Frogmore Cottage. After that, he was sent back to India, as were the rest of the Indian servants, with pensions. Not everybody shared the royal household’s low opinion of him, and Lady Curzon, wife of the Viceroy of India, remarked sadly in a letter to her husband of ‘the poor man’ having given up all his letters and the photos signed by the Queen before he returned to the country of his origin ‘like a whipped hound’.
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He settled at Karim Cottage, Agra, but his last years were overshadowed by declining health, and he died in April 1909, aged just forty-six. A short obituary notice in
The Times
alluded discreetly to his years in Her Majesty’s service when it concluded loftily that ‘he cherished the memory of his illustrious pupil with profound veneration’.
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As magnanimous as ever, King Edward VII sent a message of condolence to Karim’s relations. Nevertheless, keen to preserve the integrity of his mother’s memory, he ordered the Viceroy of India to organise a second session of letter-burning, and the Munshi’s widow was allowed to retain only a few innocuous items as souvenirs.

No such ignominious fate awaited Sir James Reid, who had ended the Queen’s reign as physician to her and to her son the Prince of Wales. Soon after the latter’s accession, he was appointed physician to the new Prince of Wales, later King George V, and enjoyed a position of royal confidence up to his death in June 1923, at the age of seventy-three. As Sir Frederick Ponsonby, King George’s assistant private secretary, readily acknowledged, he had occupied ‘such a unique position in Queen Victoria’s reign that I think she was guided more by him than anyone else’.
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Q
ueen Victoria and Prince Albert’s first child was a daughter, Victoria, ‘Vicky’, the Princess Royal, born on 21 November 1840, nine months after their wedding. ‘Never mind, the next one will be a Prince,’ the Queen assured everyone on being told her firstborn was a princess. Early the following year, the Queen learnt that she was ‘in for it again’, and within less than twelve months, on 9 November 1841, a Prince of Wales arrived.