Chapter IV: The Death of the Prince Consort (2)

On the 8th the Prince felt so well that he begged to be moved into a larger room, and as he lay in the sunshine he asked the Princess Alice to play for him some of his favourite German chorales. Tears came to his eyes as her fingers wandered over the keys. Suddenly he cried out, “_Das reicht hin_”--“that is enough”--and then the music was mute. Charles Kingsley preached that Sunday in the Chapel, but the Queen, who attended service, says in her Diary, “I heard nothing.” In the afternoon she sat by her husband and read “Peveril of the Peak,” he holding her hand, and occasionally murmuring words of love and tenderness. Lord Palmerston, himself disabled with gout, could no longer conceal his anxiety. He and his colleagues again pressed the Queen to call in some other physician, and Sir James Clark and Dr. Jenner accordingly sent for Sir H. Holland and Dr. (afterwards Sir Thomas) Watson. The Prince, after seeing the latter, spoke hopefully, and told the Queen that he was “quite the right man”--but still they noticed as a distressing sign that his mind had an increasing tendency to wander. On the 10th Lord Palmerston again urged that further medical advice should be obtained, and by this time the public were becoming alarmed at the condition of the patient. Still, ere the evening wore away even Dr. Watson admitted that the Prince had improved. But on the 11th the Queen, on visiting him in the morning to give him some beef-tea, noticed how his face, “more beautiful than ever, had grown so thin.” As she assisted him to his sofa, he stopped to look at a picture on china of the Madonna, saying, “It helps me through half the day.” The doctors, it seems, felt uneasy towards the evening, when they discovered that the Prince had begun to breathe with more difficulty. The Queen read to him during the greater part of the day, and he manifested great reluctance to let her leave him, even when her duty called her away for a few minutes. On the 12th the bad symptoms increased, and Palmerston wrote three letters, in quick succession, to Sir C. Phipps, each more distracted than the other. On the 13th Dr. Jenner had to warn the Queen that congestion of the lungs might set in, and she herself saw that her husband had become much weaker. But all through the night comforting reports were brought to her, and next morning, the 14th, Mr. Brown, the Royal apothecary, told her that Prince Albert was over the crisis. She went straight to his bedside. “I went in,” she writes, “and 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 at unseen objects, and not taking notice of me.”[109] Hour after hour, as she watched by the sick bed, the Queen saw that her husband was slowly sinking. Still, in the afternoon he knew her--for as he laid his weary head on her shoulder, he kissed her and muttered, “_Gutes frauchen_.” Then his mind would wander, and then he would doze in brief and troubled snatches of sleep. He took his children by the hand when they came and kissed him, but it is doubtful if he now knew them. Late in the afternoon he asked for Sir Charles Phipps, who came and kissed his hand, whereupon he again closed his eyes. So he lingered on, the Queen keeping her mournful watch with breaking heart. At a late hour they changed his bed, and on the Queen pointing to a favourable sign, Dr. Jenner told her that the Prince’s breathing rendered all favourable signs of no avail. At last she went to her room, but returned when she heard the breathing grow worse. The Prince was partially conscious, for when she kissed him and whispered, “_Es ist kleines Frauchen_”--“’Tis your own little wife”--he kissed her also. But he seemed desirous of being left quite undisturbed, and so she retired to her room to weep. The end was coming fast. Clark soon saw that a serious change for the worse was setting in, and the Princess Alice went to summon the Queen. When she came she found the Prince still breathing, and she knelt at the bedside, taking his cold hand in hers. On the opposite side knelt the Princess Alice--at the foot of the bed the Prince of Wales and the Princess Helena. The doctors, Generals Bruce and Grey, Sir Charles Phipps, the Dean of Windsor, Prince Ernest of Leiningen, and the faithful valet, Löhlein, stood around hushed and grief-stricken, and the sobs of those to whom the Prince was dearest alone broke the stillness of the chamber of death. The dying man’s face grew serenely soft and reposeful, as his breathing became feebler and feebler. At last he strove hard to take a long, deep breath. In this effort he passed away to his last, long rest, as the great clock of the Castle struck the third quarter after the tenth hour of the night. Those who heard the doleful chime at the Prince’s deathbed will never forget it.

“Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever look’d with human eyes.”

Of the grief that broke the widowed heart of the Queen it is not becoming to speak here. The veil of silence must be drawn over a crisis in her life too sacred, and too tragical even for her children’s eyes. But through England a great wave of sorrow swept over the hearts of men when they became conscious of all that the Prince Consort’s death might imply. Political partisans whose waywardness had harassed the Prince during his life, were not unmoved by the touching story of his last days. Some were even ready to drop a remorseful tear over his grave, when they remembered how eagerly they had, for base party purposes, too often wounded the proud but gentle heart which would now beat no more. The voice of calumny was silenced at last. The _Times_ newspaper, which had pursued the Prince with ungenerous criticism throughout his life, had, to quote the Queen’s own words in a memorandum which she wrote on this painful subject, in January, 1862, “the most beautiful articles on him when he died.” Lord Palmerston also shared in the general grief, and his biographer says that he felt the death of the Prince Consort most acutely, and looked upon it as an irreparable loss. Indeed, he was almost melodramatic in his manifestations of remorse when in presence of a member of the Royal Family. The Duke of Cambridge,

for example, considered it his duty to inform Palmerston of the sad event, and was utterly astounded at the effect the news had on him. He told Count Vitzthum that “the Prime Minister was so affected that he had fainted away several times in the presence of the Duke, who expected him to have a fit of apoplexy, and still fears that his days are numbered.” Count Vitzthum, however, adds significantly:--“He (Palmerston) recovered again in the afternoon so far as to be able to receive Baron Brunnow, who perceived nothing unusual about him.”[110] Mr. Hayward has stated that the news of the Prince Consort’s death so affected Lord Palmerston that he had a violent attack of gout.[111] According to Mr. Ashley, the Prime Minister was suffering from gout before it was suspected that the Prince Consort was dangerously ill; though, no doubt, Mr. Hayward rightly accounts for Lord Palmerston’s demonstrative emotion when he explains that he was afraid of the effect of the Prince’s death on the Queen. But this apprehension as to the weakness of her Majesty’s nerves must have quickly worn away, for when he visited her at Osborne, on the 29th of January, 1862, for the first time after the Prince’s death, he not only neglected to put on mourning, but enhanced the gaiety of his raiment by wearing green gloves and blue studs.[112]

The English people, however, had on the whole judged the Prince Consort generously through life, and they mourned over his death with genuine and unaffected sincerity. Never since the death of the Princess Charlotte was the grief of the people more widespread and more real. Friar Francis says of Hero’s supposed death--

“That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why, then we rack the value.”

Some such feeling as this was universal when, amidst the gloom that tinged the skirts of the dying year with hues of sorrow, the nation reviewed Prince Albert’s career, so full of usefulness, of self-restraint, of high aim, of patriotic purpose, of unselfish devotion. Very beautiful and touching, too, were the popular expressions of sympathy which were sent to the widowed Queen, the light of whose life had been extinguished at one fell stroke.

Till Count Vitzthum’s “Reminiscences” appeared, little that was authentic had been published as to the personal history of the Queen during the first days of her widowhood. “Just as the Queen had failed,” writes Count Vitzthum, who obtained his information from the Duke of Cambridge, “to recognise the danger till the last moment, so also she appears not to have realised, for the first few days after all was over, the full extent of her loss. Her composure was almost unnatural, and it was not till her return to Osborne that she awoke to the full consciousness of this unexpected blow. ‘Her Majesty is unnaturally quiet,’ was the remark of an eye-witness two days after the event.” The Duchess of Cambridge was the first member of the Royal Family who ventured to write to the Queen. She described the answer of the Princess Alice as “heartrending.” Her Majesty sat all day in dumb despair, staring vacantly round her, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Royal sign manual could be obtained for the most urgent business. The wise, strong affection and the capable energy of the Princess Alice, however, spared her Majesty from many anxieties at the moment when her grief was keenest. Lord Granville was the first Minister she was able to see, and she transacted some business with him a few days after the Prince’s death. Sir Charles Phipps, too, strove hard to lighten the burden of sovereignty for his Royal mistress in the darkest hours of her life; but his efforts, though well meant, gave rise to misunderstandings. “I hear,” writes Lord Malmesbury in his Diary, on the 28th of December, “that Ministers have signed a memorial to the Queen refusing to transact business with her through Sir C. Phipps.” From a constitutional point of view Palmerston and his colleagues were right in taking this course. Whether it was generous, or even wise, to annoy the Queen at such a moment with their cruelly conscientious pedantry is not a question that admits of much argument.[113] Her Majesty was able to hold her first Privy Council, after the Prince’s death, on the 11th of January, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Granville, and Sir George Grey being in attendance. The chief point under discussion was that of summoning Parliament.

The Duke of Newcastle, who was a valued friend of the Prince Consort,, had a quiet conversation with her Majesty early in January, before she left Windsor for Osborne. “His account of the Queen,” writes Mr. Hayward in a letter to Lady Emily Peel, “is highly favourable. He said his private interview left him with the very highest opinion of her strength of character.”[114] After retiring to Osborne, however, nervous exhaustion seriously impaired her strength. Lady Ely told Lord Malmesbury that during the first weeks at Osborne her Majesty seemed very low and wretched. “She (Lady Ely),” writes Lord Malmesbury on the 4th of February, 1862, “gives a sad report of the poor Queen, who talks continually about the Prince, and seems to feel comfort in doing so. She takes great pleasure in the universal feeling of sympathy for her and sorrow for him shown by all classes.”[115] King Leopold of Belgium came to Osborne in the end of January, and he endeavoured by his good offices to bring about an arrangement with Lord Palmerston for facilitating the transaction of Ministerial business with the Queen. At that time her health was not actually bad. But the King of the Belgians said that though she was outwardly composed she was not equal to the strain of dining at table, even with her half-sister, the Princess Hohenlohe, and with Prince Louis of Hesse, who were then at Osborne. She seems to have desired no other companionship in the first weeks of her widowhood save that of the Princess Alice.

Count Vitzthum was in Lisbon when the tidings of the Prince Consort’s death arrived, but he returned to London very soon afterwards. He says, “The consternation I found prevailing among all classes of the people surpassed my utmost expectations. Mr. Disraeli spoke to me with deep and heartfelt sorrow of the irreparable loss that England had sustained. ‘With Prince Albert,’ he said, ‘we have buried our Sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown. He was the permanent Private Secretary, the permanent Prime Minister of the Queen. If he had outlived some of the ‘old stagers,’ he would have given us, while retaining all constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government. Of us younger men who are qualified to enter the Cabinet, there is not one who would not willingly have bowed to his experience. We are now in the midst of a change of government. What to-morrow will bring forth no man can tell. To-day we are sailing in the deepest gloom, with night and darkness all around us.’” Some very curious details were collected by Count Vitzthum relating to the Prince Consort’s illness. On the 15th of January the Duke of Cambridge, who was then staying with his mother at Kew, invited Count Vitzthum and Count Apponyi to dinner, and from his conversation the former was able to glean the following facts:--“The illness,” writes Count Vitzthum, “which snatched away the Prince so suddenly in his forty-second year was at first nothing but a gastric fever, as his private librarian, Mr. Ruland, had informed me by letter on the day before I left for Lisbon. This so-called Windsor fever, so frequently recurrent at that season in the badly-drained town, soon, however, became typhoid. The Prince did not seem to be really ill, though as early as the 23rd or 24th of November his mind strangely wandered. His valet[116] felt instinctively what was necessary. ‘Living here will kill your Royal Highness,’ he frequently repeated. ‘You must leave Windsor and go to Germany for a time to rest and recover strength.’ These well-meant warnings passed unheeded by the patient, who showed the listlessness so foreign to his nature, but so characteristic of this disease. The most serious sign was sleeplessness and a total want of appetite. All the symptoms show that. I had the same illness myself last year. My own experience, therefore, makes me convinced that the sick man, from the indifference he showed for everything, especially for the preservation of his own life, had no idea of the danger he was in. This is the peculiarity of typhoid fever, which so completely shatters the nervous system. It requires, after timely diagnosis, complete rest and gentle treatment. When once the blood-poisoning has reached a certain stage no human aid can avail.

“Above all things the Prince seems to have had no doctor attending him who was capable of recognising the gravity of the disease in time. Unfortunately, his physician, Dr. Bayly, had been killed in a railway accident the year before. Sir James Clark, fifty years before a distinguished physician of the old school, had virtually retired from practice, and probably had but a limited knowledge of the advance made by modern science in the treatment of typhoid diseases. As physician to the Queen his position had been for twenty years a sinecure. Her Majesty enjoys such excellent health that she does not know what it is to be ill. Hence to the last moment she clung to vain hopes in regard to the condition of her husband, which Sir James very possibly confirmed. In consequence of the urgent representations of Ministers,[117] Dr. Watson and Sir Henry Holland were summoned in addition to Dr. Jenner. Sir Henry Holland is said to have been the first to have had the courage, when it was too late, to tell the Queen the truth.

“The news of the death of King Dom Pedro, whom the Prince had loved as a son, had deeply affected him.... As he himself confessed, he hardly closed his eyes from the time he received the news till the fever actually set in. The troubles with America also embittered his last hours. He was so tired that at times he nodded off to sleep when standing. He felt always cold, and ate scarcely anything. Already in the autumn at Balmoral he had a presentiment of his death. So strong was this feeling ten days before he died that he enjoined Princess Alice, having ascertained that the Queen was not in the room, to write and tell her sister in Berlin that their father would not recover. The next day he asked the Princess whether she had done so, and she replied that she had not. On the 13th, the day before his death, he got up and transacted some business with his private secretary, Mr. Ruland. The Queen drove out, and during the drive appeared much easier about her husband’s condition. On her return she found him in bed, unconscious, and with the extremities ice-cold. Now for the first time they all realised the danger. Princess Alice, on her own responsibility, sent for the Prince of Wales, who was then at Cambridge. Sir Charles Phipps telegraphed during the night for the Duke of Cambridge, who left London by the first train on the 14th, and arrived at Windsor at 8 o’clock in the morning. The alarming symptoms had increased, and the doctors did not conceal that the Prince had only a few hours to live. The Queen alone still deceived herself with hopes, and telegraphed early on the 14th to Berlin, ‘Dear Vic., Papa has had a good night’s rest, and I hope the danger is over.’” These details are important, because they partially explain the secret of what has been to many inexplicable--the extreme sorrow that has clouded the Queen’s life during her long widowhood. It has been bitter to look back on the past and see how much might have been done that was left undone to save the life which was far dearer to her than her own.

As to the public aspects of the Queen’s married life, Count Vitzthum was favoured with many disclosures from the Duchess of Cambridge. “She spoke,” writes the Count, “with tears in her eyes, of the almost unparalleled happiness of his (the Prince Consort’s) twenty years of married life, now brought to such a sudden end. In all that clear and sunny sky there was only one cloud. How gladly would the Queen have shared her crown with the husband who helped her to wear it, and was her all in all! In vain already, in Sir Robert Peel’s time, had she expressed her wish to bestow the title of King upon her husband. The constitutional scruples of the deceased Tory Minister were urged still more emphatically by Lord Palmerston when, later on, the question was again mooted. The promotion of the Prince to the title of ‘Prince Consort’ was the consequence of a compromise. Prince Albert was naturalised in 1840, and obtained, in the same year, by letters patent, precedence next to the Queen. Nevertheless, he was not a British prince, and both at Court and the Privy Council his eldest son, on attaining his majority, must have taken precedence of him. ‘For the Prince of Wales,’ as the Duke of Cambridge says, ‘is and remains Prince of Wales.’”

“The value which the Queen attached to her husband’s precedence is explained by the submissive veneration she invariably showed him in great as well as small affairs. He was complete master in his house, and the active centre of an Empire whose power extends to every quarter of the globe. It was a gigantic task for a young German prince to think and act for all these millions of British subjects. All the threads were gathered together in his hands. For twenty-one years not a single despatch was ever sent from the Foreign Office which the Prince had not seen, studied, and, if necessary, altered. Not a single report of any importance from an Ambassador was allowed to be kept from him. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Secretary for War, the Home Secretary, the First Lord of the Admiralty--all handed to him every day just as large bundles of papers as did the Foreign Office. Everything was read, commented upon, and discussed. In addition to all this, the Prince kept up private correspondence with foreign Sovereigns, with British Ambassadors and Envoys, with the Governor-General of India, and with the Governors of the various colonies. No appointment in Church and State, in the Army or the Navy, was ever made without his approbation. At Court not the smallest thing was done without his order. No British Cabinet Minister has ever worked so hard during the Session of Parliament--and that is saying a good deal--as the Prince Consort did for twenty-one years. And the Ministers come and go; or at any rate, if frequently and long in office, as was the case with Palmerston and Russell, they have four or five months’ holiday every year. The Prince had no holidays at all. He was always in harness.

“The Continental notion that Royalty in England is a sinecure was signally refuted by the example of Prince Albert. As for the charge sometimes alleged against him, that owing to his Liberalism he yielded too much to the Ministers--in other words, to Parliament--it is wholly groundless. The influence exercised on the Government by the Crown is a power which makes itself felt, not merely in crises at home and abroad, but continually. This influence is, however, indirect, and wears a different garb in England to that which it assumes, for example, in Russia and France. Prince Albert’s task was all the more difficult, since his decision depended on unknown data, and he had to reckon with the changing factors of a constitution the foundations of which have been undermined for years by the rising waves of democracy. If, in spite of all this, the Crown’s game, as Prince Metternich expressed it, has been well played, this result is doubly creditable to the late Prince, inasmuch as he could only direct the game--not play it himself. With what tact and skill he did so is proved by the fact that, with the exception of the British Ministers and a few intimate friends, no one had any idea of the actual position of the Prince during his lifetime. Those who knew it were pledged to keep the secret, which now for the first time since his death has been revealed to the nation.

“As truth appears to have been the most prominent attribute of the Prince, this necessary game of concealment must have been all the more painful to him. The daily regard for public opinion gave rise to misunderstandings, to overcome which required an amount of elasticity which was bound gradually to weaken. Sparing as the deceased was of sleep, it is difficult to understand how he found time to grapple with the mass of business. He could never call an hour his own. The continual receptions, notwithstanding the uniformity of an almost cloister-like Court life, no less than the mere physical strain caused by the continual change of residence, cut up the day into pieces and left scarcely any time for rest and reflection. The wonder is how he found it possible, in the midst of these occupations, to attend with labouring conscientiousness to the cares of government; to conduct personally the education of nine children; to prosecute his studies in all branches of human knowledge; to astonish men with the results of these studies; and at the same time to live, as he did, for art, himself a student, and constant patron of music, painting, and poetry.”[118]

From these disclosures the following conclusions can now be drawn. The Prince Consort really killed himself by overwork. The Windsor fever, which was the proximate cause of his death, was neglected at the outset. Even when the symptoms were recognised as serious they were misunderstood and treated feebly by his physicians. Finally, when competent medical advice was sought, it was sought too late.

Of the Prince Consort’s character, much that is interesting and curious might be written. “The silent father of our kings to be” was respected rather than appreciated during his life by the nation he served so well. Save for the fact that he had no special aptitude for military science, we might have traced a curious parallelism between the work he did for England, and that which was done by William of Orange. Prince Albert’s strength, and perhaps his weakness, really lay in his capacity for looking at affairs from other than merely conventional British points of view. His serene intellect had scarcely any bias traceable to prejudice or vanity. His conclusions were always based on the application of a finely tempered logical mind, to all the facts of a given case that could be collected by patient and unceasing industry. A natural love of justice and truth informed his convictions. Instinctive

(_From the Photograph by Mayall._)]

sagacity and wise tolerance characterised his judgments. The good sense--which, according to Sainte-Beuve, gave form and substance to the ideas of Louis XIV.--never deserted Prince Albert in any crisis of his life. His policy was seldom at fault, because its sole aim was to conserve national as distinguished from dynastic interests. If he erred during the Crimean War he erred with some of the wisest men of his time. If he undervalued the promise and potency of the great movement which led to Italian independence, his mistake was excusable. It was wrapt up in the tortuous policy of Napoleon III. and Cavour, which was hateful to him just because it was tortuous, and, moreover, he dreaded any movement on the Continent which, by letting loose the ungovernable ambition of the Bonapartist dynasty and giving free play to the aggressive instincts of France, might again convert Belgium and Germany into “the cockpit of Europe.” Arnold has said of Sophocles, “He saw life steadily and saw it whole.” The Prince Consort was almost alone among his contemporaries by reason of his capacity to see organised society steadily and to see it whole. He was an omnivorous, desultory reader, and his education was fortunately neither academical nor technical, neither exclusively literary nor exclusively scientific. His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, and it was gratified under the guidance of a singularly correct taste. He was constantly corresponding with all sorts of interesting people, in all ranks of life, who happened to know anything that was worth knowing. Every business, or pursuit, or calling, that made men useful to each other, or added comfort, grace, beauty, and dignity to existence, had an irresistible fascination for him. A clever critic has said of Edmund Burke what might well be said of Prince Albert, whose mind, though less imaginative was more reflective. “Burke’s imagination,” writes Mr. Augustine Birrell, “led him to look out over the whole land: the legislator devising new laws; the judge expounding and enforcing old ones; the merchant despatching his goods and extending his credit; the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant; the frugal man slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age; the ancient institutions of Church and University, with their seemly provisions for sound learning and pure religion; the parson in his pulpit; the poet pondering his rhymes; the farmer eyeing his crops; the painter covering his canvases; the player educating the feelings.”[119] Similarly, when Prince Albert thought of England or her interests, her aims, and her mission in the world, it was not the England of St. James’s or St. Giles’s, of Piccadilly or the slums, or of any special class or order, that presented itself to his mind. It was the England which the eye of the historian will see--the England which has been built up and is maintained by the toil, the self-sacrifice, the enterprise, the leadership, and the genius of all who in their several stations work for her with brain and hand. To give these workers peace and security--that was to the Prince Consort the fundamental problem of statecraft, and the only true touchstone of policies. His finger was always on the pulse of the nation, and to every change in its feverish throbbing he was as sensitive as a physician. His “catholicity of gaze” has done for his writings and his speeches, what originality of thought and brilliancy of style have done for those of other men. It has enabled them to stand the test of time. If he failed to win unbounded popularity during his lifetime, it was because, as the French say, he had the defects of his qualities. His lot was not with the idlers of the earth, and he had little in common either with an aristocracy of pleasure or a democracy of noisy but futile activities. “Society,” says Dr. Martineau, “has reason for dismay where there is an ever-widening chasm between the two summit levels of thought and character.” The Prince Consort’s public life seemed as if it were planned in order to bridge this chasm. As for his private life, it is perhaps enough to say that the veneration and love with which his family, his friends, and his servants regarded him sufficiently attest its unblemished worth. Of the calumnies that pursued him almost to the verge of the grave, there is little to add to what has been already stated in preceding chapters. They never touched his honour as a gentleman, or his conduct as the head of an illustrious family. All the attacks which were directed against him were ostensibly directed against his supposed interference with affairs of State--in the interests of foreign despots. These attacks were, however, made by the Iagos of politics, from mixed motives of malignity and self-interest. As the late Mr. Albany Fonblanque once remarked, they came from those who had distinguished themselves by their unfailing championship of every form of despotism, and by their inveterate hatred of liberty “in every province of politics, and in every part of the world.”[120] Calumny from such quarters never needed any explanation, and the Prince met it, not with a defence, but with disdain.

It was on the 23rd of December that the Prince Consort’s remains were removed from Windsor Castle, and temporarily deposited in the entrance to the Royal Vault in St. George’s Chapel, where they were to lie until the completion and consecration of a mausoleum for their reception. Shortly before noon the gloomy pageant began to file through the gate of the Norman Tower. It was headed by mourning coaches, containing four of the Prince’s old servants, followed by an array of coaches with officials of his suite and household. One of the Queen’s carriages preceded the hearse. In it was Lord Spencer, who, as the Prince’s Groom of the Stole, carried his “crown.” His _bâton_, sword, and hat were borne by Lieut.-Colonel Lord George Lennox, the Prince’s Lord of the Bedchamber. The hearse, decorated in quiet, good taste with the Prince’s escutcheons, was escorted by the Second Life Guards, followed by the Queen’s carriage, the carriages of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Duchess of Cambridge. The line of route was kept by the Second Life Guards and Scots Fusiliers with arms reversed. Long ere the procession reached St. George’s Chapel, the choir was filled by those who were invited to the ceremony, but not to join in procession, and the Knights of the Garter were in their stalls. The Royal Family met in the chapter-room at noon, from which, when the funeral procession was re-formed, on the arrival of the corpse at the South Park, they were conducted to their places by the Lord Chamberlain. As before, the servants and dependents of the Prince headed the procession. They were followed by servants and officers of the Royal household, in order of rank, the _bâton_, sword, hat, and crown

of the Prince being carried immediately before the coffin, which was preceded by Lord Sydney, her Majesty’s Lord Chamberlain. The pall-bearers were Sir Charles Phipps, General Grey, General Wylde, Colonel Francis Seymour, Lord Waterpark, Colonel Hood, Lieut.-Colonel Dudley de Ros, and Major du Plat, who were respectively Treasurer, Private Secretary, Groom of the Bedchamber, Lord of the Bedchamber, Clerk Marshal, and equerries to his Royal Highness. Immediately after the coffin came Garter King-at-Arms, followed by the Prince of Wales as chief mourner, who was supported by Prince Arthur, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-and-Gotha, and attended by General Bruce, the Crown Prince of Prussia, the Duke of Brabant, the Count de Flandres, the Duke de Nemours, Prince Louis of Hesse, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, the Count Gleichen, and the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh. They were followed by their suites. On arriving within the choir, the Prince’s crown, _bâton_, sword, and hat were reverently laid on the coffin, at the head of which stood the Prince of Wales, with Prince Arthur and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-and-Gotha on either side of him. The other illustrious mourners formed a group behind them. At the foot of the coffin the Lord Chamberlain stood, and the pall-bearers stood on each side of it. When the first part of the

service was over, the coffin was lowered into the vault. The Dean of Windsor having concluded the ritual, Garter-King-at-Arms proclaimed the style and titles of the Prince, and then the mourners left the chapel, while the “Dead March” in _Saul_ was played on the organ. Lord Palmerston’s absence was accounted for by an attack of gout, which had been aggravated by his grief for the Prince’s death. Severe illness confined the Duke of Cambridge to his room. The absence of Dr. Jenner, which was remarked, was due to a melancholy cause. He was detained at Osborne in constant attendance on the grief-stricken Queen. For during the first agony of grief that followed the death of the Prince Consort serious fears were entertained lest the Queen should herself fall ill and die. “How you suffered,” wrote the Princess Alice to her mother many long years afterwards, “was dreadful to witness. Never shall I forget what I went through for you then; it tore my heart in pieces.”[121] Although the Princess took on herself the management of the household, and both verbally and by writing strove to transact her mother’s business, it was obvious that something must be done to rouse her Majesty from the lethargy of sorrow. King Leopold accordingly insisted on an immediate change of surroundings, and decided that she must be taken to Osborne. For a time the Queen resisted this decision. Even the Princess Alice remonstrated with Sir Charles Phipps against a step which seemed to her to be cruel. But she yielded at last to King Leopold’s wishes, and it was indeed through her influence that the Queen was finally induced to quit Windsor before her husband’s remains were laid in the grave.[122] “What a blow this has been,” wrote Bishop Wilberforce to the Hon. Arthur Gordon when describing the scene at St. George’s Chapel; “all my old affection for him (the Prince Consort) has revived over his tomb--and for our poor Queen.... The funeral was most deeply affecting; you saw old dry political eyes, which seemed as if they had long forgotten how to weep, gradually melting and running down in large drops of sympathy. The two Princes and the brother (the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-and-Gotha) and the son-in-law intended (Prince Louis of Hesse) were all deeply moved.”[123]