7: Widowhood
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I
The death of the Prince Consort was the central turning-point in the history of Queen
Victoria. She herself felt that her true life had ceased with her husband's, and that the
remainder of her days upon earth was of a twilight nature—an epilogue to a drama that
was done. Nor is it possible that her biographer should escape a similar impression. For
him, too, there is a darkness over the latter half of that long career. The first
forty—two years of the Queen's life are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of
authentic information. With Albert's death a veil descends. Only occasionally, at fitful
and disconnected intervals, does it lift for a moment or two; a few main outlines, a few
remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all conjecture and ambiguity. Thus,
though the Queen survived her great bereavement for almost as many years as she had lived
before it, the chronicle of those years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier
life. We must be content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.
The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of
overwhelming personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European
importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature he might have been
expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had he done so it can hardly be doubted
that the whole development of the English polity would have been changed. Already at the
time of his death he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner
circle of politicians he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of the mechanism of
the State. Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his death as "a national calamity
of far greater importance than the public dream of," and lamented the loss of his
"sagacity and foresight," which, he declared, would have been "more than
ever valuable" in the event of an American war. And, as time went on, the Prince's
influence must have enormously increased. For, in addition to his intellectual and moral
qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme advantage which every other
holder of high office in the country was without: he was permanent. Politicians came and
went, but the Prince was perpetually installed at the centre of affairs. Who can doubt
that, towards the end of the century, such a man, grown grey in the service of the nation,
virtuous, intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole life-time of
government, would have acquired an extraordinary prestige? If, in his youth, he had been
able to pit the Crown against the mighty Palmerston and to come off with equal honours
from the contest, of what might he not have been capable in his old age? What Minister,
however able, however popular, could have withstood the wisdom, the irreproachability, the
vast prescriptive authority, of the venerable Prince? It is easy to imagine how, under
such a ruler, an attempt might have been made to convert England into a State as exactly
organised, as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, and as autocratically
controlled, as Prussia herself. Then perhaps, eventually, under some powerful
leader—a Gladstone or a Bright—the democratic forces in the country might have
rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in which the Monarchy would have been
shaken to its foundations. Or, on the other hand, Disraeli's hypothetical prophecy might
have come true. "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. If he had outlived some of our "old
stagers" he would have given us the blessings of absolute government."
The English Constitution—that indescribable entity—is a
living thing, growing with the growth of men, and assuming ever-varying forms in
accordance with the subtle and complex laws of human character. It is the child of wisdom
and chance. The wise men of 1688 moulded it into the shape we know, but the chance that
George I could not speak English gave it one of its essential peculiarities—the
system of a Cabinet independent of the Crown and subordinate to the Prime Minister. The
wisdom of Lord Grey saved it from petrifaction and destruction, and set it upon the path
of Democracy. Then chance intervened once more; a female sovereign happened to marry an
able and pertinacious man; and it seemed likely that an element which had been quiescent
within it for years—the element of irresponsible administrative power—was about
to become its predominant characteristic and to change completely the direction of its
growth. But what chance gave chance took away. The Consort perished in his prime; and the
English Constitution, dropping the dead limb with hardly a tremor, continued its
mysterious life as if he had never been.
One human being, and one alone, felt the full force of what had
happened. The Baron, by his fireside at Coburg, suddenly saw the tremendous fabric of his
creation crash down into sheer and irremediable ruin. Albert was gone, and he had lived in
vain. Even his blackest hypochondria had never envisioned quite so miserable a
catastrophe. Victoria wrote to him, visited him, tried to console him by declaring with
passionate conviction that she would carry on her husband's work. He smiled a sad smile
and looked into the fire. Then he murmured that he was going where Albert was—that he
would not be long. He shrank into himself. His children clustered round him and did their
best to comfort him, but it was useless: the Baron's heart was broken. He lingered for
eighteen months, and then, with his pupil, explored the shadow and the dust.
II
With appalling suddenness Victoria had exchanged the serene radiance
of happiness for the utter darkness of woe. In the first dreadful moments those about her
had feared that she might lose her reason, but the iron strain within her held firm, and
in the intervals between the intense paroxysms of grief it was observed that the Queen was
calm. She remembered, too, that Albert had always disapproved of exaggerated
manifestations of feeling, and her one remaining desire was to do nothing but what he
would have wished. Yet there were moments when her royal anguish would brook no
restraints. One day she sent for the Duchess of Sutherland, and, leading her to the
Prince's room, fell prostrate before his clothes in a flood of weeping, while she adjured
the Duchess to tell her whether the beauty of Albert's character had ever been surpassed.
At other times a feeling akin to indignation swept over her. "The poor fatherless
baby of eight months," she wrote to the King of the Belgians, "is now the
utterly heartbroken and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy
one is ended! The world is gone for me!... Oh! to be cut off in the
prime of life—to see our pure, happy, quiet, domestic life, which alone
enabled me to bear my much disliked position, cut off at
forty-two—when I had hoped with such instinctive certainty that God never would
part us, and would let us grow old together (though he always talked of the
shortness of life)—is too awful, too cruel!" The tone of
outraged Majesty seems to be discernible. Did she wonder in her heart of hearts how the
Deity could have dared?
But all other emotions gave way before her overmastering determination
to continue, absolutely unchanged, and for the rest of her life on earth, her reverence,
her obedience, her idolatry. "I am anxious to repeat one thing," she
told her uncle, "and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable
decision, viz., that his wishes—his plans—about
everything, his views about every thing are to be my law!
And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and
wished." She grew fierce, she grew furious, at the thought of any possible intrusion
between her and her desire. Her uncle was coming to visit her, and it flashed upon her
that he might try to interfere with her and seek to "rule the roost" as
of old. She would give him a hint. "I am also determined," she
wrote, "that no one person—may he be ever so good,
ever so devoted among my servants—is to lead or guide or dictate to me.
I know how he would disapprove it... Though miserably weak and utterly shattered,
my spirit rises when I think ANY wish or plan of his is to be touched or changed, or I am
to be made to do anything." She ended her letter in grief
and affection. She was, she said, his "ever wretched but devoted child, Victoria
R." And then she looked at the date: it was the 24th of December. An agonising pang
assailed her, and she dashed down a postcript—"What a Xmas! I won't think of
it."
At first, in the tumult of her distresses, she declared that she could
not see her Ministers, and the Princess Alice, assisted by Sir Charles Phipps, the keeper
of the Privy Purse, performed, to the best of her ability, the functions of an
intermediary. After a few weeks, however, the Cabinet, through Lord John Russell, ventured
to warn the Queen that this could not continue. She realised that they were right: Albert
would have agreed with them; and so she sent for the Prime Minister. But when Lord
Palmerston arrived at Osborne, in the pink of health, brisk, with his whiskers freshly
dyed, and dressed in a brown overcoat, light grey trousers, green gloves, and blue studs,
he did not create a very good impression.
Nevertheless, she had grown attached to her old enemy, and the thought
of a political change filled her with agitated apprehensions. The Government, she knew,
might fall at any moment; she felt she could not face such an eventuality; and therefore,
six months after the death of the Prince, she took the unprecedented step of sending a
private message to Lord Derby, the leader of the Opposition, to tell him that she was not
in a fit state of mind or body to undergo the anxiety of a change of Government, and that
if he turned the present Ministers out of office it would be at the risk of sacrificing
her life—or her reason. When this message reached Lord Derby he was considerably
surprised. "Dear me!" was his cynical comment. "I didn't think she was so
fond of them as that."
Though the violence of her perturbations gradually subsided, her
cheerfulness did not return. For months, for years, she continued in settled gloom. Her
life became one of almost complete seclusion. Arrayed in thickest crepe, she passed
dolefully from Windsor to Osborne, from Osborne to Balmoral. Rarely visiting the capital,
refusing to take any part in the ceremonies of state, shutting herself off from the
slightest intercourse with society, she became almost as unknown to her subjects as some
potentate of the East. They might murmur, but they did not understand. What had she to do
with empty shows and vain enjoyments? No! She was absorbed by very different
preoccupations. She was the devoted guardian of a sacred trust. Her place was in the
inmost shrine of the house of mourning—where she alone had the right to enter, where
she could feel the effluence of a mysterious presence, and interpret, however faintly and
feebly, the promptings of a still living soul. That, and that only was her glorious, her
terrible duty. For terrible indeed it was. As the years passed her depression seemed to
deepen and her loneliness to grow more intense. "I am on a dreary sad pinnacle of
solitary grandeur," she said. Again and again she felt that she could bear her
situation no longer—that she would sink under the strain. And then, instantly, that
Voice spoke: and she braced herself once more to perform, with minute conscientiousness,
her grim and holy task.
Above all else, what she had to do was to make her own the
master-impulse of Albert's life—she must work, as he had worked, in the service of
the country. That vast burden of toil which he had taken upon his shoulders it was now for
her to bear. She assumed the gigantic load; and naturally she staggered under it. While he
had lived, she had worked, indeed, with regularity and conscientiousness; but it was work
made easy, made delicious, by his care, his forethought, his advice, and his
infallibility. The mere sound of his voice, asking her to sign a paper, had thrilled her;
in such a presence she could have laboured gladly for ever. But now there was a hideous
change. Now there were no neat piles and docketings under the green lamp; now there were
no simple explanations of difficult matters; now there was nobody to tell her what was
right and what was wrong. She had her secretaries, no doubt: there were Sir Charles
Phipps, and General Grey, and Sir Thomas Biddulph; and they did their best. But they were
mere subordinates: the whole weight of initiative and responsibility rested upon her
alone. For so it had to be. "I am determined"—had she not declared
it?—"that no one person is to lead or guide or dictate to me;"
anything else would be a betrayal of her trust. She would follow the Prince in all things.
He had refused to delegate authority; he had examined into every detail with his own eyes;
he had made it a rule never to sign a paper without having first, not merely read it, but
made notes on it too. She would do the same. She sat from morning till night surrounded by
huge heaps of despatch—boxes, reading and writing at her desk—at her desk, alas!
which stood alone now in the room.
Within two years of Albert's death a violent disturbance in foreign
politics put Victoria's faithfulness to a crucial test. The fearful Schleswig-Holstein
dispute, which had been smouldering for more than a decade, showed signs of bursting out
into conflagration. The complexity of the questions at issue was indescribable. "Only
three people," said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the
Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor,
who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it." But, though the Prince
might be dead, had he not left a viceregent behind him? Victoria threw herself into the
seething embroilment with the vigour of inspiration. She devoted hours daily to the study
of the affair in all its windings; but she had a clue through the labyrinth: whenever the
question had been discussed, Albert, she recollected it perfectly, had always taken the
side of Prussia. Her course was clear. She became an ardent champion of the Prussian point
of view. It was a legacy from the Prince, she said. She did not realise that the Prussia
of the Prince's day was dead, and that a new Prussia, the Prussia of Bismarck, was born.
Perhaps Palmerston, with his queer prescience, instinctively apprehended the new danger;
at any rate, he and Lord John were agreed upon the necessity of supporting Denmark against
Prussia's claims. But opinion was sharply divided, not only in the country but in the
Cabinet. For eighteen months the controversy raged; while the Queen, with persistent
vehemence, opposed the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. When at last the final
crisis arose—when it seemed possible that England would join forces with Denmark in a
war against Prussia—Victoria's agitation grew febrile in its intensity. Towards her
German relatives she preserved a discreet appearance of impartiality; but she poured out
upon her Ministers a flood of appeals, protests, and expostulations. She invoked the
sacred cause of Peace. "The only chance of preserving peace for Europe," she
wrote, "is by not assisting Denmark, who has brought this entirely upon herself. The
Queen suffers much, and her nerves are more and more totally shattered... But though all
this anxiety is wearing her out, it will not shake her firm purpose of resisting any
attempt to involve this country in a mad and useless combat." She was, she declared,
"prepared to make a stand," even if the resignation of the Foreign Secretary
should follow. "The Queen," she told Lord Granville, "is completely
exhausted by the anxiety and suspense, and misses her beloved husband's help, advice,
support, and love in an overwhelming manner." She was so worn out by her efforts for
peace that she could "hardly hold up her head or hold her pen." England did not
go to war, and Denmark was left to her fate; but how far the attitude of the Queen
contributed to this result it is impossible, with our present knowledge, to say. On the
whole, however, it seems probable that the determining factor in the situation was the
powerful peace party in the Cabinet rather than the imperious and pathetic pressure of
Victoria.
It is, at any rate, certain that the Queen's enthusiasm for the sacred
cause of peace was short-lived. Within a few months her mind had completely altered. Her
eyes were opened to the true nature of Prussia, whose designs upon Austria were about to
culminate in the Seven Weeks' War. Veering precipitately from one extreme to the other,
she now urged her Ministers to interfere by force of arms in support of Austria. But she
urged in vain.
Her political activity, no more than her social seclusion, was approved
by the public. As the years passed, and the royal mourning remained as unrelieved as ever,
the animadversions grew more general and more severe. It was observed that the Queen's
protracted privacy not only cast a gloom over high society, not only deprived the populace
of its pageantry, but also exercised a highly deleterious effect upon the dressmaking,
millinery, and hosiery trades. This latter consideration carried great weight. At last,
early in 1864, the rumour spread that Her Majesty was about to go out of mourning, and
there was much rejoicing in the newspapers; but unfortunately it turned out that the
rumour was quite without foundation. Victoria, with her own hand, wrote a letter to The
Times to say so. "This idea," she declared, "cannot be too explicitly
contradicted. "The Queen," the letter continued, "heartily appreciates the
desire of her subjects to see her, and whatever she can do to gratify them in
this loyal and affectionate wish, she will do... But there are other and higher
duties than those of mere representation which are now thrown upon the Queen, alone and
unassisted—duties which she cannot neglect without injury to the public service,
which weigh unceasingly upon her, overwhelming her with work and anxiety." The
justification might have been considered more cogent had it not been known that those
"other and higher duties" emphasised by the Queen consisted for the most part of
an attempt to counteract the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. A
large section—perhaps a majority—of the nation were violent partisans of Denmark
in the Schleswig-Holstein quarrel; and Victoria's support of Prussia was widely denounced.
A wave of unpopularity, which reminded old observers of the period preceding the Queen's
marriage more than twenty-five years before, was beginning to rise. The press was rude;
Lord Ellenborough attacked the Queen in the House of Lords; there were curious whispers in
high quarters that she had had thoughts of abdicating—whispers followed by regrets
that she had not done so. Victoria, outraged and injured, felt that she was misunderstood.
She was profoundly unhappy. After Lord Ellenborough's speech, General Grey declared that
he "had never seen the Queen so completely upset." "Oh, how fearful it
is," she herself wrote to Lord Granville, "to be suspected—uncheered—
unguided and unadvised—and how alone the poor Queen feels! " Nevertheless,
suffer as she might, she was as resolute as ever; she would not move by a hair's breadth
from the course that a supreme obligation marked out for her; she would be faithful to the
end.
And so, when Schleswig-Holstein was forgotten, and even the image of
the Prince had begun to grow dim in the fickle memories of men, the solitary watcher
remained immutably concentrated at her peculiar task. The world's hostility, steadily
increasing, was confronted and outfaced by the impenetrable weeds of Victoria. Would the
world never understand? It was not mere sorrow that kept her so strangely sequestered; it
was devotion, it was self-immolation; it was the laborious legacy of love. Unceasingly the
pen moved over the black-edged paper. The flesh might be weak, but that vast burden must
be borne. And fortunately, if the world would not understand, there were faithful friends
who did. There was Lord Granville, and there was kind Mr. Theodore Martin. Perhaps Mr.
Martin, who was so clever, would find means to make people realise the facts. She would
send him a letter, pointing out her arduous labours and the difficulties under which she
struggled, and then he might write an article for one of the magazines. "It is
not," she told him in 1863, "the Queen's sorrow that keeps her
secluded. It is her overwhelming work and her health, which is greatly shaken by
her sorrow, and the totally overwhelming amount of work and responsibility—work which
she feels really wears her out. Alice Helps was wonderfully struck at the Queen's room;
and if Mrs. Martin will look at it, she can tell Mr. Martin what surrounds her. From the
hour she gets out of bed till she gets into it again there is work, work,
work,—letter-boxes, questions, etc., which are dreadfully exhausting—and if she
had not comparative rest and quiet in the evening she would most likely not be alive.
Her brain is constantly overtaxed." It was too true.
III
To carry on Albert's work—that was her first duty; but there
was another, second only to that, and yet nearer, if possible, to her heart—to
impress the true nature of his genius and character upon the minds of her subjects. She
realised that during his life he had not been properly appreciated; the full extent of his
powers, the supreme quality of his goodness, had been necessarily concealed; but death had
removed the need of barriers, and now her husband, in his magnificent entirety, should
stand revealed to all. She set to work methodically. She directed Sir Arthur Helps to
bring out a collection of the Prince's speeches and addresses, and the weighty tome
appeared in 1862. Then she commanded General Grey to write an account of the Prince's
early years—from his birth to his marriage; she herself laid down the design of the
book, contributed a number of confidential documents, and added numerous notes; General
Grey obeyed, and the work was completed in 1866. But the principal part of the story was
still untold, and Mr. Martin was forthwith instructed to write a complete biography of the
Prince Consort. Mr. Martin laboured for fourteen years. The mass of material with which he
had to deal was almost incredible, but he was extremely industrious, and he enjoyed
throughout the gracious assistance of Her Majesty. The first bulky volume was published in
1874; four others slowly followed; so that it was not until 1880 that the monumental work
was finished.
Mr. Martin was rewarded by a knighthood; and yet it was sadly evident
that neither Sir Theodore nor his predecessors had achieved the purpose which the Queen
had in view. Perhaps she was unfortunate in her coadjutors, but, in reality, the
responsibility for the failure must lie with Victoria herself. Sir Theodore and the others
faithfully carried out the task which she had set them—faithfully put before the
public the very image of Albert that filled her own mind. The fatal drawback was that the
public did not find that image attractive. Victoria's emotional nature, far more
remarkable for vigour than for subtlety, rejecting utterly the qualifications which
perspicuity, or humour, might suggest, could be satisfied with nothing but the absolute
and the categorical. When she disliked she did so with an unequivocal emphasis which swept
the object of her repugnance at once and finally outside the pale of consideration; and
her feelings of affection were equally unmitigated. In the case of Albert her passion for
superlatives reached its height. To have conceived of him as anything short of
perfect—perfect in virtue, in wisdom, in beauty, in all the glories and graces of
man—would have been an unthinkable blasphemy: perfect he was, and perfect he must be
shown to have been. And so, Sir Arthur, Sir Theodore, and the General painted him. In the
circumstances, and under such supervision, to have done anything else would have required
talents considerably more distinguished than any that those gentlemen possessed. But that
was not all. By a curious mischance Victoria was also able to press into her service
another writer, the distinction of whose talents was this time beyond a doubt. The Poet
Laureate, adopting, either from complaisance or conviction, the tone of his sovereign,
joined in the chorus, and endowed the royal formula with the magical resonance of verse.
This settled the matter. Henceforward it was impossible to forget that Albert had worn the
white flower of a blameless life.
The result was doubly unfortunate. Victoria, disappointed and
chagrined, bore a grudge against her people for their refusal, in spite of all her
efforts, to rate her husband at his true worth. She did not understand that the picture of
an embodied perfection is distasteful to the majority of mankind. The cause of this is not
so much an envy of the perfect being as a suspicion that he must be inhuman; and thus it
happened that the public, when it saw displayed for its admiration a figure resembling the
sugary hero of a moral story-book rather than a fellow man of flesh and blood, turned away
with a shrug, a smile, and a flippant ejaculation. But in this the public was the loser as
well as Victoria. For in truth Albert was a far more interesting personage than the public
dreamed. By a curious irony an impeccable waxwork had been fixed by the Queen's love in
the popular imagination, while the creature whom it represented—the real creature, so
full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible and
so very human—had altogether disappeared.
IV
Words and books may be ambiguous memorials; but who can misinterpret
the visible solidity of bronze and stone? At Frogmore, near Windsor, where her mother was
buried, Victoria constructed, at the cost of £200,000, a vast and elaborate mausoleum for
herself and her husband. But that was a private and domestic monument, and the Queen
desired that wherever her subjects might be gathered together they should be reminded of
the Prince. Her desire was gratified; all over the country—at Aberdeen, at Perth, and
at Wolverhampton—statues of the Prince were erected; and the Queen, making an
exception to her rule of retirement, unveiled them herself. Nor did the capital lag
behind. A month after the Prince's death a meeting was called together at the Mansion
House to discuss schemes for honouring his memory. Opinions, however, were divided upon
the subject. Was a statue or an institution to be preferred? Meanwhile a subscription was
opened; an influential committee was appointed, and the Queen was consulted as to her
wishes in the matter. Her Majesty replied that she would prefer a granite obelisk, with
sculptures at the base, to an institution. But the committee hesitated: an obelisk, to be
worthy of the name, must clearly be a monolith; and where was the quarry in England
capable of furnishing a granite block of the required size? It was true that there was
granite in Russian Finland; but the committee were advised that it was not adapted to
resist exposure to the open air. On the whole, therefore, they suggested that a Memorial
Hall should be erected, together with a statue of the Prince. Her Majesty assented; but
then another difficulty arose. It was found that not more than £60,000 had been
subscribed—a sum insufficient to defray the double expense. The Hall, therefore, was
abandoned; a statue alone was to be erected; and certain eminent architects were asked to
prepare designs. Eventually the committee had at their disposal a total sum of £120,000,
since the public subscribed another £10,000, while £50,000 was voted by Parliament. Some
years later a joint stock company was formed and built, as a private speculation, the
Albert Hall.
The architect whose design was selected, both by the committee and by
the Queen, was Mr. Gilbert Scott, whose industry, conscientiousness, and genuine piety had
brought him to the head of his profession. His lifelong zeal for the Gothic style having
given him a special prominence, his handiwork was strikingly visible, not only in a
multitude of original buildings, but in most of the cathedrals of England. Protests,
indeed, were occasionally raised against his renovations; but Mr. Scott replied with such
vigour and unction in articles and pamphlets that not a Dean was unconvinced, and he was
permitted to continue his labours without interruption. On one occasion, however, his
devotion to Gothic had placed him in an unpleasant situation. The Government offices in
Whitehall were to be rebuilt; Mr. Scott competed, and his designs were successful.
Naturally, they were in the Gothic style, combining "a certain squareness and
horizontality of outline" with pillar-mullions, gables, high-pitched roofs, and
dormers; and the drawings, as Mr. Scott himself observed, "were, perhaps, the best
ever sent in to a competition, or nearly so." After the usual difficulties and delays
the work was at last to be put in hand, when there was a change of Government and Lord
Palmerston became Prime Minister. Lord Palmerston at once sent for Mr. Scott. "Well,
Mr. Scott," he said, in his jaunty way, "I can't have anything to do with this
Gothic style. I must insist on your making a design in the Italian manner, which I am sure
you can do very cleverly." Mr. Scott was appalled; the style of the Italian
renaissance was not only unsightly, it was positively immoral, and he sternly refused to
have anything to do with it. Thereupon Lord Palmerston assumed a fatherly tone.
"Quite true; a Gothic architect can't be expected to put up a Classical building; I
must find someone else." This was intolerable, and Mr. Scott, on his return home,
addressed to the Prime Minister a strongly-worded letter, in which he dwelt upon his
position as an architect, upon his having won two European competitions, his being an
A.R.A., a gold medallist of the Institute, and a lecturer on architecture at the Royal
Academy; but it was useless—Lord Palmerston did not even reply. It then occurred to
Mr. Scott that, by a judicious mixture, he might, while preserving the essential character
of the Gothic, produce a design which would give a superficial impression of the Classical
style. He did so, but no effect was produced upon Lord Palmerston. The new design, he
said, was "neither one thing nor 'tother—a regular mongrel affair—and he
would have nothing to do with it either." After that Mr. Scott found it necessary to
recruit for two months at Scarborough, "with a course of quinine." He recovered
his tone at last, but only at the cost of his convictions. For the sake of his family he
felt that it was his unfortunate duty to obey the Prime Minister; and, shuddering with
horror, he constructed the Government offices in a strictly Renaissance style.
Shortly afterwards Mr. Scott found some consolation in building the St.
Pancras Hotel in a style of his own.
And now another and yet more satisfactory task was his. "My idea
in designing the Memorial," he wrote, "was to erect a kind of ciborium to
protect a statue of the Prince; and its special characteristic was that the ciborium was
designed in some degree on the principles of the ancient shrines. These shrines were
models of imaginary buildings, such as had never in reality been erected; and my idea was
to realise one of these imaginary structures with its precious materials, its inlaying,
its enamels, etc. etc." His idea was particularly appropriate since it chanced that a
similar conception, though in the reverse order of magnitude, had occurred to the Prince
himself, who had designed and executed several silver cruet-stands upon the same model. At
the Queen's request a site was chosen in Kensington Gardens as near as possible to that of
the Great Exhibition; and in May, 1864, the first sod was turned. The work was long,
complicated, and difficult; a great number of workmen were employed, besides several
subsidiary sculptors and metal—workers under Mr. Scott's direction, while at every
stage sketches and models were submitted to Her Majesty, who criticised all the details
with minute care, and constantly suggested improvements. The frieze, which encircled the
base of the monument, was in itself a very serious piece of work. "This," said
Mr. Scott, "taken as a whole, is perhaps one of the most laborious works of sculpture
ever undertaken, consisting, as it does, of a continuous range of figure-sculpture of the
most elaborate description, in the highest alto-relievo of life-size, of more than 200
feet in length, containing about 170 figures, and executed in the hardest marble which
could be procured." After three years of toil the memorial was still far from
completion, and Mr. Scott thought it advisable to give a dinner to the workmen, "as a
substantial recognition of his appreciation of their skill and energy." "Two
long tables," we are told, "constructed of scaffold planks, were arranged in the
workshops, and covered with newspapers, for want of tablecloths. Upwards of eighty men sat
down. Beef and mutton, plum pudding and cheese were supplied in abundance, and each man
who desired it had three pints of beer, ginger beer and lemonade being provided for the
teetotalers, who formed a very considerable proportion... Several toasts were given and
many of the workmen spoke, almost all of them commencing by "Thanking God that they
enjoyed good health;" some alluded to the temperance that prevailed amongst them,
others observed how little swearing was ever heard, whilst all said how pleased and proud
they were to be engaged on so great a work."
Gradually the edifice approached completion. The one hundred and
seventieth life-size figure in the frieze was chiseled, the granite pillars arose, the
mosaics were inserted in the allegorical pediments, the four colossal statues representing
the greater Christian virtues, the four other colossal statues representing the greater
moral virtues, were hoisted into their positions, the eight bronzes representing the
greater sciences—Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology, Geometry, Rhetoric, Medicine,
Philosophy, and Physiology—were fixed on their glittering pinnacles, high in air. The
statue of Physiology was particularly admired. "On her left arm," the official
description informs us, "she bears a new-born infant, as a representation of the
development of the highest and most perfect of physiological forms; her hand points
towards a microscope, the instrument which lends its assistance for the investigation of
the minuter forms of animal and vegetable organisms." At last the gilded cross
crowned the dwindling galaxies of superimposed angels, the four continents in white marble
stood at the four corners of the base, and, seven years after its inception, in July,
1872, the monument was thrown open to the public.
The Albert Memorial
But four more years were to elapse before the central figure was
ready to be placed under its starry canopy. It was designed by Mr. Foley, though in one
particular the sculptor's freedom was restricted by Mr. Scott. "I have chosen the
sitting posture," Mr. Scott said, "as best conveying the idea of dignity
befitting a royal personage." Mr. Foley ably carried out the conception of his
principal. "In the attitude and expression," he said, "the aim has been,
with the individuality of portraiture, to embody rank, character, and enlightenment, and
to convey a sense of that responsive intelligence indicating an active, rather than a
passive, interest in those pursuits of civilisation illustrated in the surrounding
figures, groups, and relievos... To identify the figure with one of the most memorable
undertakings of the public life of the Prince—the International Exhibition of
1851—a catalogue of the works collected in that first gathering of the industry of
all nations, is placed in the right hand." The statue was of bronze gilt and weighed
nearly ten tons. It was rightly supposed that the simple word "Albert," cast on
the base, would be a sufficient means of identification.
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