Great Britain and Her Queen - Anne E. Keeling

The year 1861 had already been darkened for Her Majesty by the death in the month of March, of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, to whose wise guardianship of the Queen's youth the nation owed so much, and who had ever commanded the faithful affection of this her youngest but greatest child, and of all her descendants. This death was the first stroke of real personal calamity to the Queen; it was destined to be followed by another bereavement, even severer in its nature, before the year had closed. The Prince Consort's health, though generally good, was not robust, and signs had not been wanting that his incessant toils were beginning to tell upon him. There had been illnesses, transitory indeed, but too significant of "overwork of brain and body." In addition to personal griefs, such as the death of the Duchess of Kent and of a beloved young Coburg prince and kinsman, the King of Portugal, which had been severely felt, there were the unhappy complications arising out of "the affair of the Trent," which the Prince's statesmanlike wisdom had helped to bring to a peaceful and honourable conclusion. That wisdom, unhappily, was no longer at the service of England when a series of negligences and ignorances on the part of England's statesmen had landed us in the Alabama difficulty.

All these agitations had told upon a frame which was rather harmoniously and finely than vigorously constituted. "If I had an illness," he had been known to say, "I am sure I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity of life." And in the November of 1861 an illness came against which he was not able to struggle, but which took all the country by surprise when, on December 14th, it terminated in death. Very many had hardly been aware that there was danger until the midnight tolling of the great bell of St. Paul's startled men with an instant foreboding of disaster. What disaster it was that was thus knelled forth they knew not, and could hardly believe the tidings when given in articulate words.

At first it had been said, the Prince had a feverish cold; presently the bulletin announced "fever, unattended with unfavourable symptoms." It was gastric fever, and before long there were unfavourable symptoms—pallid changes in the aspect, hurried breathing, wandering senses—all noted with heart-breaking anxiety by the loving nurses, the Queen and Princess Alice—the daughter so tender and beloved, the "dear little wife," the "good little wife," whose ministerings were so comfortable to the sufferer overwearied with the great burden of life. He was released from it at ten minutes to eleven on the night of Saturday, December 14th; and there fell on her to whom his last conscious look had been turned, his last caress given, a burden of woe almost unspeakable, and for which the heart of the nation throbbed with well-nigh unbearable sympathy. Seldom has the personal grief of a sovereign been so keenly shared by subjects. Indeed, they had cause to lament; the removal of the Prince Consort, just when his faculties seemed ripest and his influence most assured, left a blank in the councils of the nation which has never been filled up. "We have buried our king" said Mr. Disraeli, regretting profoundly this national loss; but for once the English people forgot the public deprivation in compassionating her who was left more conspicuously lonely, more heavily burdened, than even the poor bereaved colliers' wives in the North for whom her compassion was so quick and so sharply sympathetic. Something remorseful mingled then, and may mingle now, with the affection felt for this lost benefactor, who had not only been somewhat jealously eyed by certain classes on his first coming, but who had suffered much silently from misunderstanding and also from deliberate misrepresentation, and only by patient continuance in well-doing had at last won the favour which was his rightful due.

"That which we have we prize not to the worth
While we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
While it was ours."

A peculiar tenderness was ever after cherished for Princess Alice, who in this dark hour rose up to be her mother's comforter, endeavouring in every way possible to save her all trouble—"all communications from the Ministers and household passed through the Princess's hands to the Queen, then bowed down with grief.... It was the very intimate intercourse with the sorrowing Queen at that time which called forth in Princess Alice that keen interest and understanding in politics for which she was afterwards so distinguished. The gay, bright girl suddenly developed into a wise, far-seeing woman, living only for others."

Princess Alice

This ministering angel in the house of mourning had been already betrothed, with her parents' full approval, to Prince Louis of Hesse; and to him she was married on July 1st, 1862, at Osborne, very quietly, as befitted the mournful circumstance of the royal family. Many a heartfelt wish for her happiness followed "England's England-loving daughter" to her foreign home, where she led a beautiful, useful life, treading in her father's footsteps, and continually cherished by the love of her mother; and the peculiarly touching manner of her death, a sort of martyrdom to sweet domestic affections, again stirred the heart of her own people to mournful admiration. A cottager's wife might have died as Princess Alice died, through breathing in the poison of diphtheria as she hung, a constant, loving nurse, over the pillows of her suffering husband and children. This beautiful homeliness that has marked the lives of our Sovereign and her children has been of inestimable value, raising simple human virtues to their proper pre-eminence before the eyes of the English people of to-day, who are very materially, if often unconsciously, swayed by the example set them in high places.

In the May after Prince Consort's death the second International Exhibition was opened, amid sad memories of the first, so joyful in every way, and a certain sense of discouragement because the golden days of universal peace seemed farther off than ten years before.