29

The Dual Monarchy

‘WHY, WHEN ONE is so happy and blessed in one’s home life, as I am, Politics (provided my country is safe) must take only second place,’ Victoria wrote. It belied the fact that the Victorian monarchy was very hands-on. Far from being above politics, as the press and the public liked to imagine, Victoria and Albert demanded to be consulted on every aspect of policy and constantly intervened. Albert tackled a mountain of paperwork and wrote long memoranda to government on every conceivable subject of public importance, from foreign affairs to the arts and sciences to the amelioration of housing for the poor. Both he and the Queen routinely dealt with a vast correspondence.

Victoria was a determined upholder of her prerogatives and Albert stiffened her resolve. Indoctrinated by Leopold and Stockmar, he refused to contemplate a new and impotent monarchy. It should be his and Victoria’s task to revive a more energetic crown on an older model. Albert’s theories rested on some shaky assumptions. Stockmar had mistakenly dismissed the House of Commons as a talking shop which had usurped too much influence since the Reform Act of 1832. Prime Ministers came and went. The monarchy was the only fixed and disinterested part of government, which should reclaim supreme power and reassert itself as the ‘permanent premier who takes rank above the temporary head of the cabinet’.

This ran contrary to the theory, later articulated by Walter Bagehot in his The English Constitution in 1867, that the constitution was divided into two parts: the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’. The sovereign and the House of Lords represented the dignified, or decorative, part, whose function was to feature in imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress the uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The word ‘ceremonial’ increasingly came to mean powerless or empty. Behind the façade, the Cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient part, doing the real work, transacting the affairs of state. The sovereign’s exact role and power were vague; there was ‘no authentic blue book to say what she does’, no written constitution, but the ‘mystique’ of the monarchy was part of its power. Albert was determined that it should be part of the efficient, rather than the decorative, side of the constitution. He believed that the sovereign had to watch and control ministers and be centrally active in the governing process. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s he and Victoria worked tirelessly to assert the authority of the crown.

Albert’s cool temperament contrasted with the headstrong, emotional and impetuous Victoria’s. This advantage immediately came into play when Lord Melbourne’s government was finally about to fall in 1841. Through the mediation of Albert and his private secretary George Anson, who conducted preliminary discussions with Peel, another ‘bedchamber crisis’ was averted. Albert arranged for some of the Queen’s Whig ladies to resign and be replaced by ladies with less overt political sympathies. In this way, both sides saved face. The Queen was not seen to be bowing to the demands of her Prime Minister in the choice of her ladies and it looked as if the Prime Minister had her confidence. Before long, Albert had also succeeded in convincing Victoria of Peel’s worth. He was a man after Albert’s own heart: hard-working, earnest, reserved, dedicated. The royal couple’s preference was always for a Prime Minister who placed country above party, what they termed ‘a safe pair of hands’; by the time of Peel’s resignation after the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, Victoria was bemoaning the loss of ‘our worthy Peel … a man of unbounded loyalty, courage, patriotism, and high-mindedness’.

Albert regarded foreign affairs as the crown’s special preserve and conducted private correspondence with other crowned heads, independent of the Foreign Office, in which he did not hesitate to criticize his own government. It was inevitable that he would clash with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, whose ‘gun-boat’ diplomacy and marked show of favour towards foreign radicals advocating the overthrow of their absolutist rulers – many of them their relations – horrified Victoria and Albert. They were particularly incensed by Palmerston’s refusal to submit diplomatic despatches to Buckingham Palace for clearance before they were sent off, which was discourteous, if not unconstitutional. Palmerston, who took the traditional Whig view of the relationship between crown and Parliament, did not see why he should acquiesce in this royal meddling in government affairs.

In 1851, however, he overstepped the mark. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, who had hitherto ignored the Queen’s frequent pleas to get rid of him, only just pre-empted her in dismissing Palmerston over his unauthorized approval of Louis Napoleon’s ‘coup’ in France, in contravention of Britain’s declared neutrality. It is significant, however, that although the sovereign’s prerogative of appointing ministers had not yet fallen into abeyance, and Albert in particular was active in negotiating the formation of cabinets, the royal couple proved powerless to stop Palmerston’s return to Cabinet office in 1852. If he could not be kept out of the Cabinet, Victoria could at least exercise her influence by suggesting an individual was inappropriate for a particular office. Palmerston had to accept the Home rather than the Foreign Office. There was a backlash after the outbreak of the Crimean War, when Palmerston was temporarily out of office, and a scapegoat had to be found for the mismanagement of the war. Albert, a foreigner, was viciously attacked in the press for being in cahoots with the Russian enemy.

Victoria was inclined to change her mind about Palmerston in the course of the war, especially after he became Prime Minister in 1855 and his belligerent stance matched her own. Never much interested in domestic policy, Victoria was deeply concerned with Britain’s place in the world. Like Palmerston, she was fiercely patriotic and a determined advocate of British interests. With the outbreak of war, Victoria the soldier’s daughter assumed a thoroughly martial spirit. Her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, was Commander-in-Chief, but Victoria played a prominent role. She reviewed her troops on horseback at Aldershot, wearing a scarlet and gold military-style tunic, navy riding skirt and small felt hat with plumes. She insisted on going in person to watch her soldiers and sailors depart and became engrossed in the distant war, seizing on despatches and news, writing directly to her generals, and sending personal letters of condolence to officers’ widows.

‘You will understand it when I assure you that I regret exceedingly not to be a man and to be able to fight in the war,’ she wrote to Princess Augusta of Prussia. ‘My heart bleeds for the many fallen, but I consider that there is no finer death for a man than on the battlefield!’ Far removed from the horror and the squalor of it all, someone of Victoria’s romantic bent might well think so.

She helped to design the Victoria Cross, suggesting its famous motto, For Valour, and instigated the casting of the Crimean campaign medal, bestowing it personally on hundreds of returning soldiers: ‘From the highest Prince of the Blood to the lowest Private, all received the same distinction for the bravest conduct in the severest actions, and the rough hand of the brave and honest private soldier came for the first time in contact with that of their Sovereign and their Queen!’ she wrote exultantly to Leopold. ‘Noble fellows! I own I feel as if they were my own children; my heart beats for them as for my nearest and dearest. They were so touched, so pleased; many, I hear, cried – and they won’t hear of giving up their Medals, to have their names engraved upon them, for fear they should not receive the identical one put into their hands by me, which is quite touching. Several came by in a sadly mutilated state.’

The Queen visited countless wounded soldiers, urging the government to provide adequate hospital facilities for them and laying the foundation stone of the military hospital at Netley, in which she continued to take a keen interest all her life. As the Illustrated London News’s engraving, ‘Queen Victoria Inspecting the Wounded at Buckingham Palace’, demonstrates, these were scenes charged with sentiment. Here was a compassionate and patriotic Queen, her feminine sympathy aroused by the heroism of her soldiers, still wearing the clothes in which they had fought. In contrast, Reynolds’s Newspaper with its republican sympathies deplored the fact that demands for justice on behalf of the mismanaged soldiers should have been ‘swallowed in torrents of flunkey adulation which has been evoked by what has been termed the kindness and condescension of the Queen in visiting the sick and wounded’.

She wrote to Florence Nightingale to express her warm admiration for her services, ‘which are fully equal to those of my dear and brave soldiers, whose sufferings you have had the privilege of alleviating in so merciful a manner’. She sent Miss Nightingale a brooch ‘as a mark of the high approbation of your Sovereign!’ with her assurance that she looked forward to meeting ‘one who has set so bright an example to our sex’.

The Crimean War was scarcely over when news reached London of a mutiny by sepoys in the Bengal army of the East India Company at Meerut in May 1857. They had seized Delhi and other nearby towns and a month later the revolt spread to the Ganges valley. Victoria was shocked by the accounts of the massacres. Always sympathetic to the natives, she wrote to the Governor General’s wife, her former lady-in-waiting, Charlotte Canning: ‘I think that the greatest care ought to be taken not to interfere with their religion – as once a cry of that kind is raised amongst a fanatical people – very strictly attached to their religion – there is no knowing what it may lead to and where it may end.’ She hoped that the conduct of her own officers and men would ‘show the difference between Christian and Mussulmen and Hindoo – by sparing the old men, women and children,’ adding, ‘Any retribution on these I should deeply deprecate for then indeed how could we expect any respect or esteem for us in future?’ When India was brought under direct British rule in 1858, Victoria insisted that the proclamation included an assurance of religious toleration.

At home, a new sense of order and endeavour was brought to the conduct of royal business. The Hanoverians had never touched on the lives of ordinary subjects, nor sought to align the monarchy so emphatically with the major developments of the day. Under Albert’s direction, this changed dramatically. The sovereign and her consort went out among the people, to the centres of industry and new concentrations of population, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool. Their presence was an acknowledgement of the economic and social power of manufacturing and reinforced the monarchy’s centrality at a time of disorientating change. Always scornful of what they called the ‘Foxhunters’ – the old landed, reactionary aristocracy, with its idleness and extravagance – Victoria and Albert identified themselves with the new, burgeoning middle classes, embracing the same ethics of hard work, thrift, domestic probity and the belief in progress. In doing so, they satisfied the demand for a more utilitarian monarchy, one that was at least being put to work for its handsome remuneration.

Victoria had at first been reluctant to participate in civic pageantry. In September 1842, on her first visit to Scotland, she revealed an indifference to public relations that would have had later royal managers and spin doctors reeling. After a rough voyage the royal party arrived unexpectedly early in the morning. Understandably, Victoria’s only thought was to get off the heaving ship. They passed quickly through the empty streets, making straight for their temporary residence at Dalkeith House. The people of Edinburgh were dismayed that their elaborate preparations had been bypassed in this way. Members of the town council went to see Sir Robert Peel, who was travelling with the Queen, and a reluctant Victoria was persuaded to progress through the streets two days later. Similar incidents occurred on a marine tour of the south coast in 1843, when the mayors of Weymouth, Falmouth, Penryn and Truro had themselves rowed out to the royal yacht to give loyal addresses and ask ‘if it was the royal pleasure to land?’ It was not and they were dismissed.

The public desire for the royal presence was strong enough to survive Victoria’s ‘courteous’ refusals and soon the situation took a new turn. A visit to the Midlands in 1843 included an excursion to Birmingham for Albert, which was really a fact-finding mission, prompted by his interest in industry. Albert had sent a list of the places he wished to visit, but the mayor persuaded him to broaden his programme. After this, fact-finding visits to the provinces were quickly transformed by eager civic authorities into crowd-pleasing spectacles.

The Midlands visit, coincidentally, was one of the first occasions the royal couple travelled by train, although at 30mph Albert considered the new mode of transport dangerously fast. The number of subsequent tours and the range of places they were able to visit was, in part, a product of the railways’ ability to transport the Queen with relative rapidity. The royal railway carriage had a crown on top and crowds lined every station and the tracks along the route to cheer her as she passed.

The first twenty years or so of Victoria’s reign coincided with a tremendous expansion of the newspaper industry, made possible by the mechanization of production, the creation of large urban markets, and the transport infrastructure provided by the new railways. Technological advances, particularly in the field of graphic news, and the reduction and finally the abolition of stamp duty and the paper tax made printed matter more affordable to an increasingly literate readership. The development of the electronic telegraph meant that reports of the Queen’s engagements could be transmitted back to London, where newspaper offices eagerly awaited the latest royal bulletins.

The revolution in print culture became inextricably linked with the new style of monarchy inaugurated by Victoria and Albert. They undertook a vast number of regional tours, reciprocal state visits, military reviews and civic engagements, setting the precedent for future constitutional monarchs. Philanthropic activities included hospital openings, prison visits and Albert’s ceaseless drive for better housing for the working classes. What, after all, is a monarch to do, once he or she is removed from the political sphere? Much of the impact of these tours was owing to their novelty. A young couple touring different parts of the country without the traditional trappings of royalty, frequently accompanied by their infant family, meant that articles could be invested with a heady mixture of romantic sentiment, family propriety, royal patronage and local civic pride. The cumulative effect of all the media attention ensured that the monarchy continued to dominate the public sphere. As most of the coverage focused on the ‘apolitical’ side of the Queen’s activities, it reinforced the idea that the monarchy had become politically neutralized, or inactive, rather sooner than was the case.

Reading about the Queen in a newspaper or periodical, looking at the engraving of the scene described, became an everyday practice of collective identification with the Queen a national figurehead and her family everyone’s family. Most of the coverage was supportive of the monarchy; the thousands of spectators in attendance, which tended to dominate the diminutive figure of the Queen in the engravings, were seen as confirmation of the Queen’s centrality in the life of the nation and of her reliance on her people’s support. Royal visits were made to signify a popular constitutionalism, with the Queen willingly placing herself before the people; in theory at least, her position was validated not by ceremony but by the approval of her subjects. The very ordinariness of Victoria’s appearance, in bonnet and shawl, helped reinforce this notion of ‘democratic’ monarchy.

The contrast between Victoria’s reception by her people and the fate of other European monarchs in the year of revolutions, 1848, could not have been more marked. The benefits of constitutional monarchy as opposed to absolutism were there for all to see in the press reports and illustrations of the orderly crowds, the banners and cheers greeting a visit from the Queen, as opposed to the barricades, chaos and insurrection on the Continent. Only Britain escaped the upheaval, although the Queen and her family did secretly leave the capital for Osborne just before a large Chartist demonstration, which turned out to be a damp squib.

‘Our little humbug of a queen is more endurable than the rest of her race because she calls forth a chivalrous feeling,’ George Eliot noted a little acerbically. Later, in 1851, Reynolds’s Newspaper made the same point, claiming that the ‘sex of the Sovereign, more than her virtues, has closed many a quiver full of arrows that might have been discharged with fatal accuracy’. Gender might have had something to do with it, although it had not saved the heads of other queens in history who had fallen foul of the people. Nor did the Queen’s sex protect her from seven assassination attempts in the course of her reign, although most of these were not politically motivated. The royal couple’s diligence in being seen carrying out their public duties, as well as the power of a largely supportive press, undoubtedly contributed to the stability of the Victorian monarchy at this time.

The Hungry Forties were followed by a period of stability and expansion. Britain was becoming the workshop of the world; optimism was possible even outside the ranks of the increasingly prosperous middle class. The era was ushered in by the Great Exhibition of the Industries of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, the brainchild of Albert. It was to be an international celebration of work and peace, as each nation was invited to exhibit its wares. ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is’ were the words chosen by Albert as the exhibition’s motto and printed at the head of the catalogue. To work is to pray. It was a wholesome concept after the fury of war and revolution.

Needless to say, there was plenty of opposition, not least from the London residents who did not want to see their park spoilt. Albert held on to his vision. Years before, he had admired Joseph Paxton’s splendid glass conservatory at Chatsworth. Might Paxton be able to build something similar on the grand scale in Hyde Park, incorporating the centuries-old trees, so that they need not be felled? The result was a triumph for Albert, one of Victoria’s proudest days. On 1 May 1851 she recorded in her journal:

This day is one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives, with which, to my pride and joy the name of my dearly beloved Albert is forever associated! It is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness … At half past 11, the whole procession in 9 state carriages was set in motion. Vicky and Bertie were in our carriage. Vicky was dressed in lace over white satin, with a small wreath of pink wild roses, in her hair, and looked very nice. Bertie was in full Highland dress. The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings, in the highest good humour and most enthusiastic … before we neared the Crystal Palace, the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of every nation were flying … The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decorations and exhibits, the sound of the organ (with 200 instruments and 600 voices, which seemed nothing), and my beloved Husband the creator of the great ‘Peace Festival’, uniting the industry and art of all nations of the earth, all this, was indeed moving, and a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert, and my dear Country which has shown itself so great today.

Victoria visited the exhibition many times, systematically combing through the exhibits, fascinated by the glimpses they offered of foreign lands. Before it closed in October, 6 million visitors had passed through and the substantial profit was to be devoted to the creation of four museums dedicated to the arts, natural history and science, built on a four-acre site in South Kensington. It was a fitting legacy of Albert’s bold vision.

Victoria’s perceived intimacy with her subjects was accentuated by the ubiquity of her image. Previous sovereigns had to rely mainly on the coinage for the circulation of their image; Victoria had the postage stamp. In May 1840 the Penny Black was released. There had been no plan to use the Queen’s head, but the design was the result of a national competition and Benjamin Cheverton’s winning entry happened to be the only one to use it. In due course, Victoria’s image would adorn a whole plethora of artefacts, from plates to biscuit tins, which could now be produced cheaply and plentifully.

The waning of traditional court portraiture has to be seen in the context of the creation of a more populist monarchy. The growth of the print trade created a demand for more informal royal portraits. The accession of a personable young queen in 1837 had been manna from heaven for the Books of Beauty, which fed their female readers with a diet of glamorous, heavily idealized femininity. Their influence was such that their style of portraiture permeated the entire market. A prettified Victoria was depicted as softly feminine, sweet and vulnerable, decorative rather than majestic.

After she was married, Victoria’s contradictory dual role as queen and wife was captured by her court artist Sir Edwin Landseer in his Windsor Castle in Modern Times. In this romantic and fanciful domestic scene, Albert the husband is the centre of attention, as the Queen looks down demurely at him, his dog Eos gazes at him adoringly and the Queen’s Skye terrier sits up to lick his hand. He is wearing his hunting clothes, his bag of game improbably strewn about the floor, the manly sport being in sharp contrast to the Queen’s womanly delicacy, as she stands in evening dress, posy in hand. Reinforcing this vision of the family virtues, a tiny Princess Royal plays near by, while in the park outside, the Queen’s mother is being wheeled about in a bath chair. The only concession to Victoria’s regal status is that she is standing, enhancing the authority of a small woman who would otherwise be overshadowed by her husband.

Similarly, in Landseer’s painting of the royal couple dressed as Edward III and Queen Philippa at the fancy dress ball Victoria gave in support of the hard-pressed Spitalfields silk weavers, the irregularity of their relationship is again addressed. Clad in their Plantagenet costumes, the Prince no longer seems to be subservient to his wife. Standing on the steps of the throne, he is looking up at her, but he holds his lady’s hand, honouring yet ruling her. He wears the crown and the sword at his side replicates the jewelled Sword of State. Carl Haag in his Balmoral, Bringing Home the Stag emphasizes the Prince’s virility as he displays a recently slain stag for his wife’s admiration. Typically, Victoria is in evening dress, the princes are in their tartans, and the other men in the painting are appropriately in awe of Albert’s achievement.

The advent of photography, which the royal couple eagerly embraced, helped extend the popular character of the monarchy. Victoria was the first British monarch to be subject to the camera lens. Photographs of the royal family were first put on public display at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, which Albert opened in May 1857. The following year, Leonida Caldesi’s photograph of Victoria and Albert and their completed family of nine children taken at Osborne was displayed in the London Photographic Society’s fifth annual exhibition. Photographs provided a new and more accessible means of participating in the life of the royal family. Now the image of the Queen could be placed, literally, in the homes of her subjects, extending her intimacy with them. The ordinariness of her appearance – the camera did not lie, but the photographic studios took the initiative in retouching – devoid of the trappings of sovereignty symbolized the shift towards a more inclusive style of monarchy. As the mystique of monarchy began to unravel before a merciless camera lens, so the promotion of a homely royal family came to the fore.

‘A family on the throne is an interesting idea … It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life,’ Bagehot was to write in 1867. ‘Just so a royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government.’ The press and the public had become insatiable in their demand for royal coverage; the growth of women’s periodicals meant that there was also a large female readership to satisfy. ‘The women – one half of the human race at least – care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry,’ Bagehot shrewdly noted. Weddings, christenings, birthdays could no longer be considered the private preserve of the Queen and her family; they were now media events, the bigger the better. Whether they liked it or not, royalty was now locked into a pattern of mutual benefit and antagonism with the press. A court newsman was appointed to act as the interface between the royal household and the press; he was the official source, offering necessary but bland information. Henceforth, the royal family was required to perform.

By the late 1850s the novelty of Victoria and Albert’s frequent public appearances had worn off and the focus was moving gradually to their children, who had the appeal of youth. The first to be married was Vicky, the Princess Royal, in January 1858. Irked by the fact that Albert was so often outranked at events involving foreign royalty and anxious to establish his precedence after her so that he would not find himself relegated to an inferior place to his own children once they grew up, Victoria conferred the title of Prince Consort on him by Letters Patent in June 1857.

‘It is a strange omission in our Constitution that while the wife of a King has the highest rank and dignity in the realm after her husband assigned to her by law, the husband of a queen regnant is entirely ignored by the law,’ she wrote in a memorandum. ‘This is the more extraordinary, as a husband has in this country such particular rights and such great power over his wife, and as the queen is married just as any other woman is, and swears to obey her lord and master, as such, while by law he has no rank or defined position. This is a strange anomaly.’

Vicky was making a dynastic marriage to Prince Frederick William, eldest grandson of the King of Prussia. The Prussians were demanding that the marriage of the Hohenzollern heir should take place in Berlin. With characteristic aplomb, Victoria squashed any such idea. ‘Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes,’ she wrote in a note to Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, to pass on to the Prussian ambassador, ‘it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered as settled and closed.’ She was less successful when she demanded a dowry of £80,000 and an annuity of £10,000 from Parliament for her daughter; the amounts were reduced to £40,000 and £8,000 respectively. The press, meanwhile, was demanding value for money. The Times argued that the expense of the wedding would be justified provided Londoners were given a decent glimpse of the couple.

With the exception of the loss of her father, the Queen had hitherto been untouched by death. In March 1861, however, her mother died and Victoria suffered what seems to have been a nervous breakdown. Thanks to Albert’s mediation, relations between mother and daughter had been close for many years, but now profound feelings of guilt about her earlier estrangement from her mother surfaced. She filled pages of her diary with obsessive details about her mother’s last hours, her corpse, and reflections on the past. ‘I had never been near a coffin before,’ she kept repeating, sitting for hours in her mother’s room. ‘My head has been tiresome and troubles me and I can still bear little or no noise. The relief of tears is great – they come again and again every day,’ she wrote to Vicky. ‘I love to dwell on her, and to be quiet and not to be roused out of my grief.’

With Victoria indulging in an excessive display of grief and remorse and refusing even to come to meals, it was left to Albert to carry on the business of the monarchy and care of the family. He was already exhausted, worn down by the unremitting work he had taken, or rather inflicted, upon himself. Years spent labouring at his desk into the small hours meant that his once splendid figure had become flabby; he looked older than forty-two and he had gone bald. Victoria had occasionally mentioned in her letters to Vicky that Albert was suffering from his ‘old complaint’; he might have had stomach or colonic cancer for some time.

In November, feeling depressed and far from well, he pushed himself to visit the Prince of Wales in Cambridge. Bertie had already got himself into a scrape when, during a spell in the army in Ireland, his comrades had taken pity on him and smuggled an actress, Nellie Clifden, into his bed. Others would have shrugged off the incident as a natural right of passage for a young man, but Albert was heartbroken that his son had eschewed his example and advice to remain pure. Victoria, when she heard the ‘disgusting details’, was sickened. At Cambridge father and son went for a walk, which was unfortunately extended in the extreme cold as Bertie lost his way. In the carriage home, Albert began shivering; he seemed to have caught a chill. At Windsor, he took to his bed. His last service to Victoria and his adopted country was to amend the wording of a telegram to the United States government just as that country descended into civil war; his intervention probably prevented war between Britain and America.

‘I do not cling to life,’ he had once told Victoria. ‘You do; but I set no store by it.’ And then he added, ‘I am sure, if I had a severe illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity for life.’ Indeed, ‘he died for want of pluck,’ Victoria later accused him. ‘The Queen alone is enough to kill any man,’ William Ewart Gladstone complained in another context. Nevertheless, the notion persists that like the spider who eats her mate, Victoria had killed her man. Albert had worked himself to death in her service.

As Lord Clarendon scathingly noted, Prince Albert’s medical attendants were ‘not fit to nurse a sick cat’. Sir James Clark, the principal physician in attendance, failed to diagnose typhoid or to invite a second opinion until it was too late. If and when he did suspect typhoid, he hesitated to name the disease for fear of upsetting Victoria, whom he considered incapable of bearing anxiety. It might have helped if Albert had received professional nursing, but it was left largely to his daughter, Princess Alice, and his valet to care for him. Victoria refused to believe the illness was fatal, until the morning of 14 December. As she entered the sickroom, ‘never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright gazing as it were on unseen objects and not taking notice of me.’ ‘Es ist kleines Frauchen,’ she whispered to him, as he slipped in and out of consciousness that day. Towards evening, she briefly left the room and was hastily called back by Princess Alice, who recognized the death rattle.

‘Oh, this is death,’ Victoria cried, taking his cold hand, ‘I know it. I have seen this before.’ With Victoria kneeling beside him and the Prince of Wales and other members of the family and the doctors gathered in the room, Albert died just before eleven that night. ‘Oh! my dear Darling!’ she cried in despair, kissing him on the forehead.

At first she appeared calm, in shock. ‘You will not desert me? You will all help me?’ she enquired anxiously of everyone there.

‘We have buried our sovereign,’ Benjamin Disraeli commented after Albert’s funeral. ‘This German prince has governed England for twenty one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings has ever shown.’ Disraeli exaggerated, although the sentiments were genuine enough. Albert had never really been popular in England; he was considered too German, too earnest, too prim.

The dual monarchy was over. Victoria confidently expected to follow her ‘beloved angel’ to the grave shortly. Given the severity of her grief, she would have been dismayed to know that her life span had just entered its second half and that she would reign alone for another forty years.