Queen Victoria Blamed Edward VII For His Father’s Death In 1861

Queen Victoria could not look at her eldest son, the future Edward VII, “without a shudder” after Prince Albert died at Windsor in December 1861. She believed his affair with Nellie Clifden, begun at the Curragh army camp that September, had worn her husband down. Bertie had been graded since the nursery, down to a phrenologist reading his skull at two and a half. Ten weeks with the Grenadier Guards in Ireland gave him his first evenings to himself, and two initials in his engagement diary. Albert, already sleeping badly, answered with eleven pages from Windsor, a long walk in the rain at Madingley Hall on 25 November and a second letter, twelve pages long. On 14 December he died in the Blue Room at forty-two, with no post-mortem and typhoid on the register. Her verdict outlasted Albert by forty years. Bertie walked behind the coffin as chief mourner, waited until his mid-forties for Foreign Office despatches, stood in the Mordaunt divorce court in 1870 and survived typhoid of his own in 1871. Whether Albert's fever was typhoid at all is still argued, most sharply by J. W. Paulley in 1993. 0:00 Two initials, three times in one week 0:56 Measured against his father from birth 4:09 Ten weeks on the Curragh plain 6:52 Eleven pages from Windsor 8:38 A walk in the rain at Madingley 10:39 The rash and the Blue Room 13:58 No post-mortem, one culprit 15:54 Chief mourner at twenty 19:47 Typhoid again, ten years on Sources: Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (2012); Bee Wilson's review, London Review of Books 34:18 (2012): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n... Royal Archives catalogue: Albert to the Prince of Wales, 16 November 1861 (VIC/MAIN/Z/141/94) and 28 November 1861 (Z/141/95); telegram from Cambridge, 25 November 1861 (Z/297/47); Queen Victoria's account of the Prince Consort's illness and death (Z/142): https://www.rct.uk/group/381/content/... · https://albert.rct.uk/collections/roy... Queen Victoria to King Leopold, 29 November 1841: https://historyofroyalwomen.com/the-y... Queen Victoria to the Crown Princess of Prussia, 18 December 1861 (Dearest Mama, ed. Roger Fulford): https://www.historyofroyalwomen.com/t... Queen Victoria's journal, 7, 10 and 14 December 1861 and 27 February 1872 (transcriptions): https://queenvictoriaroses.co.uk/2023... · https://www.youngqueenvictoria.co.uk/... The Spectator, 21 December 1861: https://archive.spectator.co.uk/artic... Royal Collection Trust, Memorialising Albert (the Trent draft; interiors): https://www.rct.uk/group/381/content/... Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement, "Edward VII": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictio... Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, chapter XV: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_o... J. W. Paulley, "The death of Albert Prince Consort: the case against typhoid fever", Quarterly Journal of Medicine 86 (1993) 837–841: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8108541/ Helen Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession (2011); "What really killed Prince Albert?", The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/what-real... The London Gazette, Privy Council, 23 January 1901: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-noti... "Royals in court: why Harry's ancestor entered the witness box in 1870" (the Mordaunt case): https://guernseypress.com/news/uk-new... "An Irishman's Diary", The Irish Times (Nellie Clifden and the Curragh): https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an... #EdwardVII #QueenVictoria #PrinceAlbert