“Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever look’d with human eyes.”
Of the grief that broke the widowed heart of the Queen it is not becoming to speak here. The veil of silence must be drawn over a crisis in her life too sacred, and too tragical even for her children’s eyes. But through England a great wave of sorrow swept over the hearts of men when they became conscious of all that the Prince Consort’s death might imply. Political partisans whose waywardness had harassed the Prince during his life, were not unmoved by the touching story of his last days. Some were even ready to drop a remorseful tear over his grave, when they remembered how eagerly they had, for base party purposes, too often wounded the proud but gentle heart which would now beat no more. The voice of calumny was silenced at last. The Times newspaper, which had pursued the Prince with ungenerous criticism throughout his life, had, to quote the Queen’s own words in a memorandum which she wrote on this painful subject, in January, 1862, “the most beautiful articles on him when he died.” Lord Palmerston also shared in the general grief, and his biographer says that he felt the death of the Prince Consort most acutely, and looked upon it as an irreparable loss. Indeed, he was almost melodramatic in his manifestations of remorse when in presence of a member of the Royal Family. The Duke of Cambridge,
THE PRINCESS ALICE READING TO HER FATHER.
for example, considered it his duty to inform Palmerston of the sad event, and was utterly astounded at the effect the news had on him. He told Count Vitzthum that “the Prime Minister was so affected that he had fainted away several times in the presence of the Duke, who expected him to have a fit of apoplexy, and still fears that his days are numbered.” Count Vitzthum, however, adds significantly:—“He (Palmerston) recovered again in the afternoon so far as to be able to receive Baron Brunnow, who perceived nothing unusual about him.”[110] Mr. Hayward has stated that the news of the Prince Consort’s death so affected Lord Palmerston that he had a violent attack of gout.[111] According to Mr. Ashley, the Prime Minister was suffering from gout before it was suspected that the Prince Consort was dangerously ill; though, no doubt, Mr. Hayward rightly accounts for Lord Palmerston’s demonstrative emotion when he explains that he was afraid of the effect of the Prince’s death on the Queen. But this apprehension as to the weakness of her Majesty’s nerves must have quickly worn away, for when he visited her at Osborne, on the 29th of January, 1862, for the first time after the Prince’s death, he not only neglected to put on mourning, but enhanced the gaiety of his raiment by wearing green gloves and blue studs.[112]
The English people, however, had on the whole judged the Prince Consort generously through life, and they mourned over his death with genuine and unaffected sincerity. Never since the death of the Princess Charlotte was the grief of the people more widespread and more real. Friar Francis says of Hero’s supposed death—
“That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why, then we rack the value.”
Some such feeling as this was universal when, amidst the gloom that tinged the skirts of the dying year with hues of sorrow, the nation reviewed Prince Albert’s career, so full of usefulness, of self-restraint, of high aim, of patriotic purpose, of unselfish devotion. Very beautiful and touching, too, were the popular expressions of sympathy which were sent to the widowed Queen, the light of whose life had been extinguished at one fell stroke.