Queen's House (27 page)

In June 1852, in his tender for the work on the Ballroom, he promised ‘that the work proposed shall not exceed the estimate of £45,000. That every care shall be taken to carry out the works in the most economical manner consistent with its purpose and an accurate account to be kept of all costs.' He agreed to be satisfied with a profit of seven per cent, taking all the risks and responsibilities. The work was carried out under the direction of his Clerk of the Works, Peter Hogg, who also obtained permission to supply fixtures and fittings for the kitchens.

In the end extra funds had to be provided to pay for the decorations, which were ‘so very elaborate, so highly decorated and so different from those of almost every other Building upon which the Builders are employed'.
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In fact Cubitt made very little profit out of this, his last work for Prince Albert.

Blore had left no adequate plans for the new wing. In any case, Prince Albert had never admired his pedestrian work. Pennethorne submitted his own plans, but they appear to have been based on those drawn up by Cubitt and the Prince. The Prince himself, assisted by Gruner, intended to supervise the interior decoration of the new wing; Cubitt was to be responsible for the carcass. His workmen lined the walls of some of the rooms ready for painting, but he would have nothing to do with what he called ‘fancy painting'.

Pennethorne had absorbed much of the spirit of Nash in his years of apprenticeship and later collaboration with him. So the exterior of the Ballroom at the south-west corner of the Palace follows Nash's elegant lines. New kitchens and domestic offices were added below to serve the State Dining Room and supper room.

Inside all was splendour. The vast Ballroom, 123 feet long, 60 feet wide and 45 feet high, was one of the largest in England. At the west end, the throne dais was designed as a magnificent setting for Queen and Consort. Their crimson thrones stood before a dramatic recess, the gilded Corinthian pillars supporting an arch embellished with sculptured figures and ornaments and surmounted by a crowned medallion showing Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in profile. On either side, seated figures represented History and Fame and before the arch two marble statues stood with musical instruments, symbolizing the cultural interests of Queen and Consort. Here they received their subjects in an elegant grandeur guaranteed to outshine emperor, tsar or shah.

Facing them at the other end of the Ballroom a great organ with gilded pipes was set in another recess. Between them, suspended from the ceiling, shone twenty-one gas burners in glass chandeliers. On either side were ten tall bronze candelabra, each fitted with forty-three branches for wax candles. When they were all lit the heat was overwhelming.

The structure of the room, strong but elegant, was designed by James Pennethorne, but the walls were decorated by Gruner under the direction of Prince Albert himself. This was the opportunity Prince Albert and Gruner had longed for – a chance to demonstrate the beauty of fresco painting and encourage its reintroduction. According to
The Builder,
in May 1856,

the ceiling rested on a wide richly-decorated cove below which was an elaborate frieze. The upper part of each side wall was divided into thirteen compartments, seven of which were windows and the others filled with wall paintings representing the Twelve Hours. The lower part of the walls was covered with crimson silk brocade, and above the doors were sculptured groups by Theed.

At night the effect was stunning. The seven windows,
The Builder
described,

are the windows which at night are filled with gaslights from behind … six are surrounded by large borders and represent figures of the Hours, taken from sketches by Raffaele [sic] and executed about life-size by Professor Consoni at Rome.

There were also ‘four cupids from Raffaelle's [sic] frescoes at Farnese Palace'.
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Prince Albert's passion for the Italian Renaissance at last could be fully expressed. When the room was lit for a ball, filled with flowers, sparkling with the jewels of hundreds of ladies, the effect was brilliant, as the memoirs of the period show.

On 8 May 1856 the Queen held her first state ball in the new room. As she recorded in her Journal, it was a tremendous success, ‘the elegant toilettes of the ladies and numerous uniforms' adding even more colour to the glowing room. Many of the officers were her heroes, returned from the Crimean War, resplendent in scarlet, medals flashing. The diplomatic corps was well represented, taking up the whole of one side of the Ballroom. For the first time at a ball in the Palace there was comfort. Three tiers of seats on each side allowed ‘everyone to see and be seen'. The Queen herself danced six quadrilles, and Prince Albert, still graceful, though now a little stiff, partnered his Queen as he had done twenty years before. ‘It was truly', the Queen wrote, ‘a most successful Fete and everyone was in great admiration of the rooms.'
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Buckingham Palace, rebuilt and refurbished, was now ready to dazzle even the most splendid of foreign monarchs. On 25 January 1858 Queen Victoria had the chance to display the Queen of England in a worthy setting. On that day, her eldest daughter, Vicky, was married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who was to become Emperor of Germany.
Princess Victoria had become engaged in September 1855. It was a marriage arranged by her parents, but the young pair were genuinely in love.

The wedding took place in the Chapel Royal. They returned to Buckingham Palace, then, as the Queen wrote in her Journal, ‘we went with the young couple to the celebrated window at which they stepped out and showed themselves, we and the Prince and Princess [of Prussia] standing with them'. The banquet which followed was one of the most splendid ever given in the Palace, for, as the Queen wrote to the British Ambassador in Berlin, apropos of the German desire to have the wedding in Germany, ‘It is not
every
day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England.'
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The Palace was decorated as never before. Chandeliers sparkled above the long table, heavy with crystal and gold plate. The immense mirrors reflected the thousand guests, brilliant in diamonds and pearls. The Queen, as her biographer Lady Longford describes, ‘smothered herself with diamonds and then with a contrariness which was so much a part of her, decorated her dress and hair with rustic flowers and grass'.
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After four days of honeymoon at Windsor, the newly married couple left for Germany, leaving Queen Victoria somewhat relieved to have Prince Albert to herself again. Prince Albert missed the daughter who had been, of all their children, the most like him.

In 1857 Prince Albert also lost the companionship of Stockmar, who finally retired to Germany. He was now old and frail and wanted to spend his last years in his own country. He bequeathed his son to Vicky, now Princess Frederick William of Prussia, to act as her secretary in her German court. For more than twenty years Baron Stockmar had devoted his life to the creation of a stable British monarchy. It is difficult to know what drove him, besides a deep admiration for Britain and its constitution. But his influence on the transformation of the Court from the sleazy corruption of the Regency period should never be underestimated. As a doctor with an interest in psychology he had observed closely all the players in the royal game, from George III onwards. In the young Prince of Wales he could see the family face. When Bertie, as he was known to his family, threw the crockery or was brutal to his equerries, he remembered how the
uncles had loved to smash and hurt. When he saw how charming he could be, he recalled how the handsome young Prince Regent had been transformed into a gross and self-indulgent King. When he saw the Prince of Wales wild with irrational rage he recognized the face of Queen Victoria herself; she herself confessed that her son was a caricature of herself.
*
For the previous ten years Stockmar had helped to prepare the Prince of Wales for kingship. But not even Stockmar could create character, and Bertie was quite unlike his father. Stockmar and Prince Albert had planned his education in numerous memoranda. If Edward VII did not turn out to be the complete Renaissance man, it was not for want of their trying.
Punch
saw the dangers:

Thou dear little Wales – sure the saddest of tales
    In the tale of the studies with which they are cramming thee;
In thy tuckers and bibs, handed over to Gibbs,
    Who for eight years with solid instruction was ramming thee.

Then, to fill any nook Gibbs had chanced to o'erlook,
    In those poor little brains, sick of learned palaver,
When thou'dst fain rolled in clover, they handed thee over,
    To the prim pedagogic protection of Tarver …

Where next the boy
may
go to swell the farrago,
    We haven't yet heard: but the Palace they're plotting in,
To Berlin, Jena, Bonn, he'll no doubt be passed on to,
    And drop in, for a finishing touch, p'raps, at Gottingen.

'Gainst indulging the passion for the high pressure fashion
    Of Prince-training, Punch would uplift a loyal warning;
Locomotives we see, over-stoked soon may be,
    Till the supersteamed boiler blows up some fine morning.
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Stockmar and Prince Albert had striven to train the wayward young man. In April 1849 Bertie had been given a suite of his own in Buckingham Palace and a kind young tutor, Henry Birch, replaced in 1851 by a
pedantic classical scholar. He was given short spells at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but always under the strictest control.

Oxford improved him and when, on a visit to Germany, Bertie visited Baron Stockmar in his retirement the old man was delighted with him. Prince Albert was overjoyed that Stockmar had seen such improvement in him. During the long vacation of 1860, Bertie made an official visit to Canada and America, where he was fêted and for the first time developed a confidence in himself. His boyish charm captivated the New World, as it would do all his life. He spent a short spell at Cambridge University. In 1861 during a vacation he spent in infantry training at the Curragh Camp near Dublin, his fellow officers decided to carry on the education of the Prince by smuggling an actress, Nellie Clifden, into his room. It was at Curragh that Bertie learned that delight in women that would mark him throughout his life as Edward VII.

The Prince Consort's health had begun to cause concern in the late 1850s. He was seriously over-stressed: he had, in fact, shouldered much of the responsibility of the Queen, and indeed had worked harder than any cabinet minister for many years. Foreign affairs, which he well understood, concerned him deeply. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had worn him down; and there had been a sudden flurry of French hostility roused by a plot, planned in England, to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon III – no throne was safe.

Prince Albert had been completely drained by his work for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and throughout the decade had continued to take an active part in the encouragement of science, industry and the arts.

So in the autumn of 1860, when he and Queen Victoria paid their last visit to his old home in Coburg, Prince Albert was tired and dispirited. He was seriously shaken by a carriage accident there and Stockmar, who was now in retirement there, visited him immediately afterwards and was deeply concerned. The old man, as he said, had never till now realized how much he loved the Prince and shrewdly foresaw that ‘here was a man incapable of fighting an illness'.
⁸⁶

Walking around his beloved home, Prince Albert seemed to realize that it would be the last time and wept uncontrollably.

The year 1861 brought tragedy. In March the Duchess of Kent died, leaving the Queen heartbroken. Reading through her mother's papers she realized for the first time how much her mother had loved her.

In spite of the tender love of the Prince, Queen Victoria was in such low spirits all that summer that there were rumours that she might be inheriting the mental instability of her grandfather, George III.

So, when Prince Albert fell ill in November 1861 with what he thought was a chill, they were both at a low ebb. The Prince was, in fact, in the early stages of typhoid fever. Nevertheless he worked on ceaselessly.

On 11 November a devastating blow fell: news reached the ears of the Queen and Prince of the scandal of the Prince of Wales's affair with the actress at the Curragh. The news was deeply shocking, especially as they hoped to arrange a marriage with the lovely Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

Prince Albert travelled in the cold November to Cambridge, where he talked long into the night with his son, urging him to marry soon, for ‘you must not, you dare not be lost. The consequences for this country and for the world would be too dreadful.'
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Father and son were reconciled; but Queen Victoria always believed that it was the stress of this journey that killed Prince Albert. Certainly it must have been one of the factors that weakened his resistance to the typhoid fever which took hold in early December.

He worked to the end. He made his last important political contribution when he was almost too weak to hold a pen, redrafting a terse memorandum that the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, was proposing to send to America which might well have dragged Britain into the American Civil War. His tactful draft turned away the wrath of the Federal government, but it was his last memorandum.

He was obsessed by the fear of typhoid, which had recently killed his favourite cousin, the King of Portugal, and the onset of fever convinced him that death was near.

Again and again in his delirium he called for Stockmar, just as the dying Princess Charlotte had done so long ago. But Stockmar, who had
given him so much, could not give him what he needed now: the will to live.

On 14 December 1861 at 10.45 p.m. Prince Albert died. It was not until 1874 that the distraught Queen could bring herself to record his last moments in her Journal. She had asked for ‘
ein kuss
' and ‘he moved his lips, then two or three perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine …'
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