The Duchess of Kent died in March, 1861. There is no consolation in being told that such a loss is common. It is not common to the heart that has to bear it. The Queen felt, as all must feel when death takes from them a beloved parent, that part of her life was gone which nothing could restore. She wrote in the diary so often quoted:—
“How awful! How mysterious! But what a blessed end! Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over! But I—I, wretched child—who had lost the mother I so tenderly loved, from whom for these forty-one years I had never been parted except for a few weeks, what was my case? My childhood—everything seemed to crowd upon me at once. I seemed to have lived through a life, to have become old! What I had dreaded and fought off the idea of for years, had come, and must be borne. The blessed future meeting, and her peace and rest, must henceforward be my comfort.”
In a letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, now the last survivor of his generation, the Queen wrote that she felt “so truly orphaned.” The Queen was sustained in her sorrow by the tender sympathy of her husband and of her daughter, the Princess Alice, whose strong and beautiful character, already well known in her home circle, was to be revealed to the nation a few months later. The Princess was now entering on womanhood, and had recently been betrothed to Prince Louis of Hesse, nephew of the reigning Grand Duke. After her lamented death in 1878, a volume, with extracts from her letters to the Queen, was published as a memorial. In these she repeatedly recurs to the fact that when the Duchess of Kent died, the Prince Consort took his daughter by the hand and led her to the Queen, and told her she “must comfort mamma.” A few months later, when the place in the Palace of the husband and father was vacant, the Princess recalled these words, and accepted them as a sacred trust and bequest. She nobly justified the confidence her father had reposed in her. In this earlier bereavement it was her office to comfort and sustain the Queen, who wrote: “Dear, good Alice was full of intense feeling, tenderness, and distress for me; she, and all of them, loved ‘grandmamma’ so dearly.”
The Queen and Prince appreciated fully all that the former had owed to her mother,—the watchful vigilance and wisdom with which, from the date of her husband’s death, in 1820, the Duchess had devoted herself to the one object of preparing her baby daughter for the great future which awaited her. Stockmar had been her friend from the hour of her bereavement; it was from him that she learned that the illness of her husband could have no other than a fatal termination; he had stood by her through the long years of her loneliness, surrounded as she was by difficulties, jealousies, and misrepresentations; he had always appreciated her warm heart and innate truthfulness. He wrote of her that “she was by sheer natural instinct truthful, affectionate, and friendly, unselfish, sympathetic, and even magnanimous.” All these testimonies to her worth were recalled now with gratitude and love by the sorrowing Queen. She was deprived of one solace which she might have had, the presence of her half-sister, Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe, the only other surviving child of the Duchess. She had recently been left a widow (April, 1860), and could not leave Germany.
Lady Augusta Bruce (afterwards Lady Augusta Stanley) had been one of the Duchess’s ladies-in-waiting, and had been almost a daughter to her in love, and more than her own daughter could be in tender, watchful service. The Queen now transferred Lady Augusta to her own household, nominally as Resident Bed-Chamber Woman, really as assistant secretary; and from this time a very strong bond of affection was established between them, which was unbroken until Lady Augusta’s death. The Queen also received help and consolation from the presence of her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who hurried to her parents on hearing of their loss. But notwithstanding all consolations, the Queen’s heart was very sore, and her faithful, tender nature is one which clings with tenacious gratitude to the memory of precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Eleven years after her mother’s death, Her Majesty’s journal for the 17th August, 1872, has the following entry: “Beloved mamma’s birthday. That dear mother, so loving and tender and full of kindness! How often I long for that love!” The Queen did not attend her mother’s funeral. “I and my girls,” she wrote, “prayed at home.” A special trial belonging to the position of Royalty must be its isolation. No subject can be on terms of equality with a Sovereign; crowned heads are therefore thrown almost wholly on their own immediate families for that life-giving sympathy and criticism which can hardly exist in perfection except between equals. To the Queen the loss of her mother, followed by the loss of her husband, brought the silencing of the only voices in the world who could say to her, in love, “You have been wrong, you have made a mistake.” Consider what it must be never to hear any language except that of homage and respect, never to listen to plain truths put plainly, never to be laughed at, seldom to be laughed with; and then imagine what it must be to lose the few who belong to that close inner circle for whom these formalities are non-existent.[30] One can only compare it to the position of a man on a desert island, who, having possessed a Bible or a Shakespeare, wakes one morning to find them destroyed or carried away by the tide. It has been sometimes said by English women that the Queen’s loss when she lost her husband was not greater than that of thousands and millions of women among her subjects; it has even been said that Her Majesty’s loss was not so great: some women, at one blow, by the death of their husbands, are face to face with the wolf of poverty and hunger for themselves and their children. No one can think lightly of such anguish; but if the inner history of such lives could be told, would it not often be found that the curse was turned into a blessing, that the necessity to seek active work, the friends found in seeking it and in doing it, gave relief to the heartache, and that the rod of chastisement had been converted into the staff of strength?
“Get leave to work
In this world,—’tis the best you get at all;
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat
For foreheads;’ men say, ‘Crowns:’ and so we are crowned,
Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel
Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;
Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.”
The year preceding the death of the Prince Consort had been, perhaps, fuller than ever of public and private interests. In the autumn of 1860, the Queen and her husband met their daughter, Princess Frederick William of Prussia, with her two children, at Coburg. This was the first sight the Queen had of her grandson, “Dear little William, ... such a darling, and so intelligent; ... a very pretty, clever child.” During this visit to Coburg the Prince was in a serious carriage accident, from which, however, he escaped almost uninjured. The Queen’s thankfulness is more touching by the light of after events. She gave 1,200 florins to found an annual gift for apprenticing young men and women in Coburg, to be distributed every year on the anniversary of her husband’s escape. Tours had been arranged, and were taking place in 1860, for the Prince of Wales in Canada and the United States, and for Prince Alfred in Cape Colony; the parents constantly received the most gratifying news of the impression made by their sons, and the great loyalty their visits had called forth. Most courteous and cordial letters on the subject of the Prince of Wales’s visit were exchanged between the Queen and the President of the United States. The Queen addressed the President as “My good Friend,” being the nearest approach which the circumstances admitted to the exclusively royal “mon cher frère.” Special and sympathetic reference was made in both letters to the young Prince’s visit to the tomb of Washington. Arrangements were made by the Prince Consort for the Prince of Wales’s residence on his return from America for a year at the University of Cambridge. Before this, for the ostensible purpose of allowing the Prince of Wales to attend the German military manœuvres, it was arranged that he should have the opportunity of making the acquaintance of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The Prince Consort notes with obvious satisfaction in his diary “that the young people seem to have taken a warm liking for one another.”
Plans were also made during this autumn for a visit by the Prince of Wales to the Holy Land.
The cares of a large family were particularly pressing on the Queen and Prince during this year. Prince Leopold, who was delicate from his birth, had a sharp attack of measles, which caused great anxiety. It was necessary to send him (aged only seven) to Cannes for the winter; and the choice of suitable people to take charge of the delicate little lad was necessarily an anxious one. Among the other engagements of this autumn was included a visit to Ireland, with a hurried excursion to the Curragh to see the Prince of Wales, who was going through a course of military training there.
With regard to public affairs, foreign politics were more than ordinarily absorbing. It was the year of the triumphal entry of Garibaldi into Naples, and of Victor Emmanuel into the Papal States. The Queen and Prince followed these events with more anxiety and less sympathy than the Ministry or the nation. The Prince dubbed Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, “the two old Italian masters.” The Court seems to have failed to appreciate the constructive greatness of Garibaldi, and could see in him little more than a kind of picturesque bandit. The fruit of his labors towards the unification of Italy was now, however, nearly ripe, and before the death of the Prince Consort the English Government had acknowledged the title of Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy. On the Eastern Question the Queen and Prince were troubled and perplexed by the tendency of Turkey to relapse into all her old vices of oppression and bad government, and by the evident hesitation of the French Emperor upon the question whether it would not be to his interest to throw over the English and form a Russian alliance.