“May your life, which has begun beautifully, expand still further to the good of others and the contentment of your own mind! True inward happiness is to be sought only in the internal consciousness of effort systematically directed to good and useful ends. Success indeed depends upon the blessing which the Most High sees meet to vouchsafe to our endeavours. May this success not fail you, and may your outward life leave you unhurt by the storms, to which the sad heart so often looks forward with a shrinking dread! Without the basis of health it is impossible to rear anything stable. Therefore see that you spare yourself now, so that at some future time you may be able to do more.”
The death of Prince Albert on December 14, 1861, at the age of forty-two, profoundly affected the lives of both his widow, on her now lonely throne, and his idolized daughter in Berlin. It is evident from Queen Victoria’s correspondence that she was quite unprepared. Her letters to King Leopold almost up to the last are full of the most pathetic hopefulness, and she certainly wrote in the same vein of cheery optimism to Berlin. The blow fell therefore with all the more stunning effect on both mother and daughter—indeed, it is hard to say which of the two felt more utterly crushed and broken-hearted.
The Crown Princess, as we have seen, was much more her father’s child than is usual in family life in any station. The tie between them was something deeper and stronger even than the natural affection of parent and daughter; he had sedulously formed her mind and tastes, and he had become the one counsellor to whom she felt she could ever turn in any perplexity or trouble, sure of his helpful understanding and sympathy. Very soon after her marriage, in a letter to the Prince of Wales, she dwelt on their father as the master and leader ever to be respected: “You don’t know,” she wrote, “how one longs for a word from him when one is distant.”
Nor did the Princess, like many daughters, allow her marriage to weaken this tie; indeed, the thought of the physical distance between them seemed to bring them, if possible, spiritually nearer. For her mother, the Princess felt the tenderest and most filial affection, writing to her every day, sometimes twice a day, about the little details of her personal life. But though she and her father only wrote to one another once a week, it was to him that she poured out her full self, the total of her varied interests in politics, literature, science, art, and philosophy. The citations already made in the preceding pages from the Prince’s letters to her show, not only the many fields over which their correspondence ranged, but also the singular charm of their mutual confidence. It would be difficult to find in history a more touching and beautiful example of spiritual and intellectual communion between father and daughter.
And now this great solace and stay of the Princess’s life is suddenly withdrawn from her, practically without any warning. If only she had known, even suspected, that there was danger, how she would have hurried to him! No one with any imagination and human sympathy can think of it without profound pity.
During the first weeks which followed the receipt of the telegram announcing his death the Crown Princess fell into a silent, listless state, only rousing herself to bursts of grief which were terrible to witness. The simple religious faith to which her mother turned could not, unfortunately, bring her the same consolation. In her extremity it was on her husband that she leaned. He was untiringly patient and tender, though it must have been most painful for him to be told that she felt as if her life was over and she could never be happy again.
It is surely true to say that in these difficult days the Crown Prince revealed the essential nobility of his character quite as much as he did in the great spectacular moments of his life—on the stricken field and in the glory of conquest. Many a husband would have shown a certain resentment at his wife’s absorption in her father, but it is clear that the Crown Prince, far from feeling any such petty jealousy, brought his wife the truest consolation by understanding and himself sharing in her sorrow. He knew what a really remarkable man Prince Albert was, he had felt the charm of his personality and of his intellectual gifts; and so we find him looking back on this bereavement, in a letter written some months later to his old tutor, M. Godet:
“Our whole life is, if such a thing be possible, increasing in happiness daily. All the tribulation, all the bitterness, of my outside life, and of what I may call my practical life, I am able to leave behind me when I reach the door which leads to my ‘home.’ We had the great grief of losing my dear father-in-law, the most intimate and tender friend of my wife, and to me a true second father. It came like a clap of thunder on our peaceful, happy life. We are now deprived of him whom we thought would help to guide us during many many years, and now the British Sovereign is bereft of her only help, while Europe is deprived of one of her most brilliant and most distinguished minds.”
It may reasonably be doubted whether to the Crown Princess the prolongation of her father’s life would have been of great service. We cannot feel at all sure that in her critical relations with Bismarck, for instance, his counsel would always have been of the safest kind. He had not brought her up to be the wife of an autocratic sovereign, still less that of the wife of an Heir Apparent; she was brought up as might have been a Prince of Wales in a constitutional country.
By an unfortunate irony of fate, all those who warmly and sincerely sympathised with the point of view of the Prince Consort, and of herself and the Crown Prince, were not Prussians; they were—in the phrase then generally used—Coburgers. This was pre-eminently the case with Stockmar, and in a less degree with Bunsen and other Liberal Germans. The mere fact that they were not Prussians discounted any value their opinions might otherwise have had, both with the then King of Prussia and with those who surrounded him.