DEATH OF THE DUCHESS OF KENT.
The Duchess of Kent was now seventy-five years of age. For the last few years she had been in failing health, tenderly cared for by her children. When she had been last in town she had not gone to her own house, Clarence House, but had stayed with her daughter in the cheerful family circle at Buckingham Palace.
A loss in her household fell heavily on the aged Duchess. Sir George Cooper, her secretary, to whose services she had been used for many years, a man three years her junior, died in February, 1860.
In March the Duchess underwent a surgical operation for a complaint affecting her right arm and rendering it useless, so that the habits of many years had to be laid aside, and she could no longer without difficulty work, or write, or play on the piano, of which her musical talent and taste had made her particularly fond. The Queen and the Prince visited the Duchess at Frogmore on the 12th of March, and found her in a suffering but apparently not a dangerous condition.
On the 15th good news, including the medical men's report and a letter from Lady Augusta Bruce, the Duchess of Kent's attached lady-in- waiting, came from Frogmore to Buckingham Palace, and the Queen and the Prince went without any apprehension on a visit to the gardens of the Horticultural Society at Kensington. Her Majesty returned alone, leaving the Prince to transact some business. She was "resting quite happily" in her arm-chair, when the Prince arrived with a message from Sir James Clark that the Duchess had been seized with a shivering fit— a bad symptom, from which serious consequences were apprehended.
In two hours the Queen, the Prince, and Princess Alice were at Frogmore. "Just the same," was the sorrowful answer given by the ladies and gentlemen awaiting them.
The Prince Consort went up to the Duchess's room and came back with tears in his eyes; then the Queen knew what to expect. With a trembling heart she followed her husband and entered the bedroom. There "on a sofa, supported by cushions, the room much darkened," sat the Duchess, "leaning back, breathing heavily in her silk dressing- gown, with her cap on, looking quite herself"
For a second the sight of the dear familiar figure, so little changed, must have afforded a brief reprieve, and lent a sense of almost glad incredulity to the distress which had gone before. But the well-meant whisper of one of the attendants of "Ein sanftes ende" destroyed the passing illusion. "Seeing that my presence did not disturb her," the Queen wrote afterwards, "I knelt before her, kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the dreadful reality was before me that for the first time she did not know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went out to sob…. I asked the doctors if there was no hope; they said they feared none whatever, for consciousness had left her…. It was suffusion of water on the chest which had come on."
The long night passed in sad watching by the unconscious sufferer, and in vain attempts at rest in preparation for the greater sorrow that was in store.
A few months earlier, on the death of the King of Prussia, the Prince Consort had written to his daughter that her experience exceeded his, for he had never seen any person die. The Queen had been equally unacquainted with the mournful knowledge which comes to most even before they have attained mature manhood and womanhood. Now the loving daughter knelt or stood by the mother who was leaving her without a sign, or lay painfully listening to the homely trivial sounds which broke the stillness of the night—the crowing of a cock, the dogs barking in the distance; the striking of the old repeater which had belonged to the Queen's father, that she had heard every night in her childhood, but to which she had not listened for twenty-three years— the whole of her full happy married life. She wondered with the vague piteous wonder—natural in such a case—what her mother, would have thought of her passing a night under her roof again, and she not to know it?
In the March morning the Prince took the Queen from the room in which she could not rest, yet from which she could not remain absent. When she returned windows and doors were thrown open. The Queen sat down on a footstool and held the Duchess's hand, while the paleness of death stole over the face, and the features grew longer and sharper. "I fell on my knees," her Majesty wrote afterwards, "holding the beloved hand which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my heart would break…. It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten scene. Fainter and fainter grew the breathing; at last it ceased, but there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed as they had been for the last half-hour…. The clock struck half-past nine at the very moment. Convulsed with sobs I fell on the hand and covered it with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room, himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over; he said, "Yes." I went into the room again after a few minutes and gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had done before, but was already white. Oh, God! how awful, how mysterious! But what a blessed end. Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over."
By the Prince's advice the Queen went at once to the late Duchess's sitting-room, where it was hard to bear the unchanged look of everything, "Chairs, cushions … all on the tables, her very work- basket with her work; the little canary bird which she was so fond of, singing!"
In one of the recently published letters of Princess Alice to the Queen, the former recalled after an interval of eight years the words which her father had spoken to her on the death of her grandmother, when he brought the daughter to the mother and said, "Comfort mamma," a simple injunction which sounded like a solemn charge in the sad months to come.
The melancholy tidings of the loss were conveyed by the Queen's hand to the Duchess's elder daughter, the Princess of Hohenlohe; to the Duchess's brother, the King of the Belgians—the last survivor of his family—and to her eldest grand-daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia.
The moment the Princess Royal heard of the death she started for
England, and arrived there two days afterwards.
The unaffected tribute of respect paid by the whole country, led by the Houses of Parliament, to the virtues of the late Duchess, was very welcome to the mourners. The Duchess of Kent by her will bequeathed her property to the Queen, and appointed the Prince Consort her sole executor. "He was so tender and kind," wrote the Queen, "so pained to have to ask me distressing questions, but spared me so much. Everything done so quickly and feelingly."
The funeral took place on the 25th of March, in the vault beneath St. George's Chapel, Windsor. The Prince Consort acted as chief mourner, and was supported by two of the grandchildren of the late Duchess, the Prince of Wales and the Prince of Leiningen. The pallbearers were six ladies; among whom was Lady Augusta Bruce. Neither the Queen nor her daughters were present. They remained, in the Queen's words, "to pray at home together, and to dwell on the happiness and peace of her who was gone." On the evening of the funeral the Queen and the Prince dined alone; afterwards he read aloud to her letters written by her mother to a German friend, giving an account of the illness and death of the Duke of Kent more than forty years before. The Queen continued the allowances which the Duchess of Kent had made to her elder daughter, the Princess Hohenlohe, and to two of the duchess's grandsons, Prince Victor Hohenlohe and Prince Edward Leiningen. Her Majesty pensioned the Duchess's servants, and appointed Lady Augusta Bruce, who had been like a daughter to the dead Princess, resident bedchamber woman to the Queen.
Frogmore had been much frequented by Queen Charlotte and her daughters, and was the place where they held many of their family festivals. It had been the country house of Princess Augusta for more than twenty years. On her death it was given to the Duchess of Kent. It is an unpretending white country house, spacious enough, and with all the taste of the day when it was built expended on the grounds, which does not prevent them from lying very low, with the inevitable sheet of water almost beneath the windows. Yet it is a lovely, bowery, dwelling when spring buds are bursting and the birds are filling the air with music; such a sheltered, peaceful, home-like house as an ageing woman well might crave. On it still lingers, in spite of a period when it passed into younger hands, the stamp of the old Duchess, with her simple state, her unaffected dignity, her affectionate interest in her numerous kindred. The place is but a bowshot from the old grey castle of Windsor. It was a chosen resort of the royal children, to whom the noble, kind, grandame was all that gracious age can be. Here the Queen brought the most distinguished of her guests to present them to her mother, who had known so many of the great men of her time. Here the royal daughter herself came often, leaving behind her the toils of government and the ceremonies of rank, where she could always be at ease, was always more than welcome. Here she comes still, after twenty years, to view old scenes—the chair by which she sat when the Duchess of Kent occupied it, the piano she knew so well, the familiar portraits, the old-fashioned furniture, suiting the house admirably, the drooping trees on the lawn, under which the Queen would breakfast in fine weather, according to an old Kensington —an old German—custom.
The long verandah was wont to contain vases of flowers and statues of the Duchess's grandchildren, and formed a pleasant promenade for an old lady. Within the smaller, cosier rooms, with the softly tinted pink walls covered with portraits, was led the daily life which as it advanced in infirmity necessarily narrowed in compass, while the State rooms remained for family and Court gatherings. The last use made of the great drawing-room by its venerable mistress was after her death, when she lay in state there.
Half-length portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Kent are in the place usually occupied by the likenesses of the master and mistress of the house. Among the other pictures are full-length portraits of the Queen and Prince Albert in their youth, taken soon after their marriage— like the natural good end to the various pictures of her Majesty in her fair English childhood and maidenhood, with the blonde hair clustering about the open innocent forehead, the fearless blue eyes, the frank mouth. The child, long a widow in her turn, a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, must look with strange mingled feelings on these shadows of her early, unconscious self.
There are innumerable likenesses of the Queen's children such as a loving grandmother would delight to accumulate, from the baby Princess Royal with the good dog Eos curled round by her side, the child's tiny foot on the hound's nose, to the same Princess a blooming girl-bride by the side of her bridegroom, Prince Frederick William of Prussia.
The Duchess's other children and grandchildren are here on canvas, with many portraits of her brothers and sisters and their children. A full-length likeness of the former owner of Frogmore, Princess Augusta, Fanny Burney's beloved princess, hangs above a chimneypiece; while on the walls of another room quaintly painted floral festoons, the joint work of the painter, Mary Moser, and the artistic Princess Elizabeth, are still preserved.
Frogmore was for some years the residence of Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. When she removed to Cumberland House, the furniture which had belonged to the Duchess of Kent was brought back, and the place restored as much as possible to the condition in which she had left it, which implies the presence of many cherished relics— such as the timepiece which was the last gift of the Queen and the Prince, and a picture said to have been painted by both representing Italian peasants praying beside a roadside calvary. There are numerous tokens of womanly tastes in the gay, bright fashion of the Duchess's time, among them a gorgeously tinted inlaid table from the first Exhibition, and elaborate specimens of Berlin woolwork, offerings from friends of the mistress of the house and from the ladies of her suite. In one of the simply furnished bedrooms of quiet little Frogmore, as it chanced, the heir of the Prince of Wales first saw the light. For here was born unexpectedly, making a great stir in the little household, Prince Victor Albert of Wales.