The Heir Apparent (13 page)

What passed between them is not known, but the result was that Albert forgave his son.
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Albert returned to Windsor a sick man. “I never saw him so low,” said Victoria.
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She blamed Albert’s depression and sleeplessness on Bertie’s fall, which “broke him quite down.” Albert himself confided in Vicky that his “shattered state” was due to worry, “about which I beg you not to ask questions.”
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Neither Albert nor Victoria could see that his anxiety over Bertie was an emotional overreaction, as much a symptom as the cause of his wretchedness.

Watching the Eton volunteers two days later, Albert shuddered inside his fur-lined coat. The day was warm, but he felt as if water were being poured down his back. Not until 7 December, after he had been miserably ill for more than two weeks, did the doctors make a diagnosis of “fever,” meaning typhoid. Listless and irritable, unable to eat or sleep, Albert wandered restlessly day and night, pacing Windsor’s state bedrooms in his quilted dressing gown.

In Cambridge, Bertie spent his time larking with Natty Rothschild and his hounds. “It is perhaps better to say as little as possible about the festivities here,” a conscience-stricken Natty later wrote.
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When Albert was diagnosed with typhoid, Bertie was warned that he must not return to Windsor, for fear the fever was epidemic.
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But he received little detailed news about his father’s illness, and Victoria wrote no letters to him. Vicky, on the other hand, who was pregnant in Berlin and not permitted to travel, was kept fully informed by Victoria, who wrote almost daily to her daughter.

Victoria found the diagnosis of fever oddly reassuring. Sir William Jenner promised her the prince would recover when the fever had taken its natural course, and she allowed herself to hope. She seemed
not to realize that Albert had become dangerously ill. Only the eighteen-year-old Alice, who sat for long hours by her father’s bedside, knew the truth.

On Wednesday, 11 December 1861, Alice wrote to Bertie telling him that Albert was “very ill, but continues to improve.”
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In fact, the doctors that evening noticed an ominous change in Prince Albert’s breathing, and they feared the onset of the dreaded “congestion of the lungs,” or pneumonia.
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Later, as Alice read aloud from the Bible, Albert stopped her and asked: “Is your Mother in the room?”

“No,” said Alice.

“Before you go to bed tonight I want you to write to your sister at Berlin & tell her that she must be prepared for the worst. I feel sure I shall never get over this.” The next day Albert’s fever was worse, he became delirious, and he vomited foul-smelling, bloodied mucus into a bowl held by Alice. Again he asked her: “Is your Mother here?” and finding her alone, he asked if she had done as he wished.

“Yes,” said Alice, “but I also added that we hoped you saw danger where there was none.”

“Oh,” said he, “you could not say that now. I see the doctors think me in great danger.”
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Albert never asked for Bertie nor mentioned his name. Victoria had no intention of summoning him. So it was Alice who sent a telegram to her brother in Cambridge, asking him to return to Windsor.
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It was “cautiously worded” and gave no indication that Albert was critically ill.
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Bertie spent Friday hunting, “rejoicing over the good news from Windsor,” which he had received in Alice’s earlier letter.
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Not until he returned in the afternoon did he see the telegram, and he thought so little of it that he decided to stay for a dinner engagement with some dons, and left by the eleven o’clock train. He arrived at Windsor at three a.m., talking cheerfully. He was “appalled” to learn how ill his father really was.
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When Bertie saw his father at ten a.m. the next day (Saturday, 14 December 1861), Albert briefly recognized him, but his breathing was alarmingly rapid, his tongue was blackened and swollen, he could barely speak, and his face was changed. He rambled incoherently, repeating
Bertie’s name. The doctors still gave slight grounds for hope, and Bertie wrote to Louis, Alice’s fiancé: Their father was “fighting for his life. In 24 hours we will know for sure—almighty God hear our prayers.”
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By late afternoon, it was plain that Albert was sinking. The doctors prepared for the end. At five thirty p.m., the bed was wheeled to the center of the room, and Victoria sat on one side.
“Gutes Frauchen”
(good little wife) were Albert’s last coherent words to her. He agreed to see the Prince of Wales, but when Bertie took his hand, followed by Helena, Louise, and Arthur, Albert was dozing and showed no signs of recognition. He asked for Sir Charles Phipps, and his three private secretaries trooped in one after another and kissed his hand, weeping as they did so.

As the evening wore on, Albert’s breathing grew more painful and he was bathed in sweat. Victoria knelt beside him, holding his left hand, which was already cold. Alice knelt opposite her. At the foot of the bed knelt Bertie with Helena. This ghastly tableau continued for some time until the Queen could bear it no longer and rushed from the room. At ten forty-five p.m., Alice heard the struggle for breath that she knew was the death rattle, and called her back. After a few gentle breaths it was all over.

Victoria flung herself passionately upon the bed and embraced her dead husband, uttering every endearment she knew. She was removed from the room in hysterics.

Bertie followed her, threw his arms round her neck, and cried: “Indeed Mama I will be all I can to you.” He promised to do his utmost to take his father’s place. He told her he would “hold his life to hers.” Victoria kissed him, and said, “I’m sure my dear boy you will.”
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In the first few days after Albert died, Bertie stayed very close to Victoria. He barely left her room; he wrote letters for her and took meals to her, waiting on her like a devoted servant. The Queen was sedated with opiates, but she couldn’t bear Bertie or Alice to be away from her. To observers it seemed as if the Queen and her heir were reconciled.
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But the stark fact was that if Alice had not summoned him, Bertie would not have been present at Albert’s deathbed. As it
was, the death came as a profound shock, for which he was utterly unprepared.

Albert’s funeral took place in wintry gloom at St. George’s Chapel on 23 December 1861. Sobbing uncontrollably at being forced to tear herself away from Albert’s deathbed, the Queen had already left Windsor for Osborne with Alice, Louise, and Helena; it was customary for widows not to attend their husbands’ funerals, and Victoria was in no state to appear in public. Bertie was chief mourner and walked at the head of the procession behind the coffin, wearing a kilt and accompanied by the weeping eleven-year-old Arthur. (Affie was away at sea, and the hemophiliac Leopold was recuperating in the South of France.) On entering the chapel, Bertie was “very much distressed.”
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Albert’s body, dressed in the uniform of a field marshal—even in death he was on duty—was lowered into a temporary resting place in the crypt below the altar, a space more like a coal hole that contained the remains of the kings of England.
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Naturally the doctors were blamed for the prince’s death. “They are not fit to attend a sick cat,” said Lord Clarendon. The diagnosis of fever was made very late, but this may have been deliberate. Sir James Clark knew his patients’ psychology well enough to predict that the very word “fever,” which to the Victorians spelled the killer typhoid, would cause the Queen to have hysterics and Albert to resign himself to death. But the consequence of Clark’s efforts to protect Albert’s peace of mind was that the Prince Consort received no professional nursing. He was attended only by Alice and his valet; he was not confined to bed but allowed to wander about from room to room.
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Victoria refused to permit an autopsy. Albert’s doctor, Sir William Jenner, was Europe’s leading authority on typhoid, and at the time there was no reason to doubt his diagnosis. But no other cases of this infectious waterborne illness were reported either at Windsor or Sandhurst, where the prince was sometimes alleged to have contracted it. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but Albert was weakened by an underlying illness. Some have suggested that his symptoms
fit a diagnosis of stomach cancer.
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The latest theory is that he suffered from Crohn’s disease. Though unknown to medicine until the early twentieth century, this progressive inflammation of the gut could explain Albert’s chronic abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea.
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He often talked about death, telling Vicky that “he would not care if God took him that moment, he always felt ready.” He once told Victoria: “I do not cling to life.… I am sure, if I had a severe illness I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life.”
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Looking back on the case, Sir James Clark wrote in his diary: “There was excessive mental excitement on one very recent occasion, mental depression, and exposure on two occasions to fatigue and cold.”
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This was what Victoria wanted to hear. She needed someone to blame for Albert’s death. Medical opinion agreed with her that the mental excitement and depression caused by Bertie’s fall, culminating in the sad, wet mission to Madingley, had killed her beloved Albert. In attempting to save their own reputations, the doctors validated the Queen’s emotional rejection of her son, doing lasting damage. For years afterward, Victoria blamed Bertie for Albert’s death.

The sharp-eyed courtiers who scanned the Prince of Wales for signs of grief reported that the bereavement made no deep impression.
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Bertie wrote tight letters that gave little away. To his friend Carrington he said: “I have received a sad blow in the loss of my Father, who was kindness itself to me, though I fear that I have often given him pain by my conduct.”
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He told another Cambridge friend, “I am still quite stunned by the dreadful blow … and can hardly yet realize it.”
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A reporter who caught a glimpse of him off his guard noted that he “appeared very careworn, and suffering severely.”
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But the mask rarely slipped. Bertie was an emotional character and easily moved to tears, but he did not allow himself to grieve for his father’s death.

Albert’s death marked the beginning of a new reign. Effectively, he had been king. He had reformed the monarchy, distancing it from Victoria’s “wicked uncles” and identifying the “royal family” with middle-class domestic virtue. He had reorganized its finances, cut waste, and
eliminated corruption. Thanks to the savings he made on the Civil List, the Crown could live within its means without appealing to Parliament for more, significantly strengthening its political position. Osborne and Balmoral were both paid for out of savings.
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On the other hand, he had interfered in politics, attempted to shape foreign policy, and acted almost as an unofficial member of the Cabinet. As Disraeli put it, he planned “to establish court-influence on the ruins of political party … with perseverance equal to that of George the Third and talent infinitely greater.”
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He had taken political business out of the hands of the Queen, who had become de-skilled; she could barely write a letter unless Albert drafted it. At dinner, politicians noticed how Albert would prompt Victoria in German, and then, like a ventriloquist’s doll, she would ask the question he suggested.
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It’s worth asking the counterfactual question: What would have happened if Albert had lived? His spectacular career demonstrates just how much could be achieved by a genuinely able ruler. But his quest for power was arguably destined to set the monarchy on a collision course with Parliament. His inability to delegate and his insistence on keeping control of the court in his own hands are worrying signs. In some ways, his death was opportune. It removed the Crown from the front line of politics at a time when the rise of a robust system of two-party politics meant that retreat was essential to the monarchy’s survival. At the moment of his death, however, Albert seemed indispensable. Now the entire burden of monarchy fell to Victoria, and this hysterical widow, crippled by grief, seemed of all people the least capable of bearing it.

The deeper the Queen retreated into mourning, the greater was Bertie’s opportunity to seize a political role, as his father had done before him. As heir to the throne and a male, Bertie was a figure of national importance. Leaders appeared in
The Times
urging the Prince of Wales to reject a life of frivolity and follow a career of usefulness, filling the place left by his father. Inspired by court insiders, the editor of
The Times
implored the Queen not to follow the example of the Hanoverians and quarrel with her heir. Instead, she should take him into her confidence and prepare him for the duties of government.
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Bertie read the
Times
articles with great attention, and was reportedly “very
struck” by them.
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But he seemed fatally lacking in ambition. Instead of grasping power, he allowed himself to be outmaneuvered by his mother into a position of impotence. Breaking with Hanoverian tradition, the Prince of Wales did not become the focus of opposition to the reigning monarch.

Victoria’s grief was all-consuming. “Why may not the earth swallow us up?” she wailed.
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She had leaned on Albert for everything, never donning a gown or a bonnet without his approval. In her private journal of “Remarks Conversations Reflections,” the Queen poured out thousands of words of unedited grief. “Oh
no
more
peaceful
blessed nights!… 
Those
w[hich] seemed a foretaste of Heaven—for their peace.”
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