The preparations for celebrating the Princess’s arrival go on at a wondrous rate. Every house has its balcony of red baize seats; wedding favours fill the shops, and flags of all sizes; often the banners are already waving, and the devices for illumination fixed. In Pall Mall this evening rows of workmen were supping on the pavement ready to begin again by gaslight, with their work. The town seems as full as in the height of the season: one may say that the carpenters and gasfitters are all working day and night, while the rest of the population spend their time in watching them.
Princess Alexandra arrived at Gravesend aboard the Victoria and Albert on the morning of 7 March. ‘A deafening cheer’ went up from the crowds along the banks of the river, and from scores of craft bobbing about in the water, as the Prince eagerly hurried up the gangway to kiss the Princess affectionately. He introduced her to various members of his household, then led her to the railway station, where a train was waiting to take them to Southwark.
Huge crowds of people, wearing wedding favours and waving Danish flags, had gathered at Southwark and all along the lavishly decorated carriage route over London Bridge, across the City, and down the Strand through Pall Mall, St James’s Street, Piccadilly and Hyde Park to Paddington Station, where another train waited to take them on to Slough. So many people, in fact, were crammed between the triumphal arches and the streaming banners that the police lost control of them in the City, and the Life Guards who had escorted the carriages from Southwark had to clear the way with drawn sabres.
At about a quarter to three A.J. Munby, who had with great difficulty gained a place of vantage in King William Street, heard the bands approaching and ‘the sound of deep hurrahs’ coming nearer and nearer.
The great crowd surged to and fro with intense expectation. The glowing banners of the City procession reappeared and passed; and the countless carriages full of blue robes and scarlet robes and Lord Lieutenants’ uniforms; and the Volunteer bands and the escort of the Blues; and the first three royal carriages whose occupants … were heartily cheered. But when the last open carriage came in sight, the populace, who had been rapidly warming to tinder point, caught fire all at once. ‘Hats off!’ shouted the men; ‘Here she is’ cried the women; and all those thousands of souls rose at her, as it were, in one blaze of triumphant irrepressible enthusiasm; surging round the carriage, waving hats and kerchiefs, leaping up here and there and again to catch sight of her; and crying Hurrah … She meanwhile, a fair haired graceful girl, in a white bonnet and blush roses, sat by her mother, with ‘Bertie’ and her father opposite, smiling sweetly and bowing on all sides; astounded — as she well might be — but self possessed; until the crowd parted at length.
Throughout the tedious four-hour-long journey the Princess remained calm and composed, acknowledging the cheers with smiles and nods, waving her gloved hands, ‘bowing so prettily, so gracefully, right and left incessantly’. All the way from Slough to Windsor the Princess retained this remarkable composure, smiling at the cheering Eton boys as though refreshed rather than exhausted by the excitement and strain of the day.
There was further strain to endure at Windsor, where her carriage arrived in darkness and torrential rain; for although the Queen greeted her kindly, it was clear that the sad memories aroused by thoughts of the ceremony that was to take place in St George’s Chapel on 10 March were to cast their gloom over what she professed to be ‘the only ray of happiness in her life since her husband’s death’. She was too ‘desolate’ to come down to dinner, which she had served to her and a lady-in-waiting in a different room; and was ‘much moved’ when, to show her sympathy with the Queen’s distress, ‘Alix knocked at the door, peeped in and came and knelt before [her] with that sweet, loving expression which spoke volumes’. The Queen kissed her ‘again and again’.
Princess Alexandra was ‘much moved’ herself, so the Queen recorded, when, the day before the wedding, she took the bride and bridegroom to the mausoleum at Frogmore where Prince Albert was buried: ‘I opened the shrine and took them in … I said, “He gives you his blessing!” and joined Alix’s and Bertie’s hands, taking them both in my arms. It was a very touching moment and we all felt it.’
The Queen, ‘very low and depressed’, according to Lady Augusta Bruce, remained preoccupied with thoughts of her husband even on the day of the wedding. She had decided that she could not bring herself to take part in the procession to the chapel, nor to discard her mourning for the day. She would continue to wear the black streamers of widowhood and her black widow’s cap with a long white veil. She would put on the badge of the Order of the Garter that her ‘beloved one had worn’ and a miniature of his noble features. She would proceed to the chapel from the deanery by a specially constructed covered way and enter directly into the high oak closet on the north side of the altar which Henry VIII had built so that Catherine of Aragon could watch the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter. She would have herself photographed, sitting down in front of the bridal pair, looking at neither of them but gazing instead at a marble bust of the Prince Consort.
Princess Alexandra, in happy contrast, looked radiant, ‘regular nailing’, in the opinion of an Eton boy. ‘She was a little pale but her eyes weren’t red.’ Her white dress was trimmed with Honiton lace and garlanded with orange blossom; and, as she prepared to enter the chapel, its enormously long silver train was held up by eight English bridesmaids, ‘eight as ugly girls,’ so Lady Geraldine Somerset thought, ‘as you could wish to see’. The Princess had cried earlier when she said goodbye to her mother, but now she appeared as content as she was assured and beautiful.
The bridegroom seemed less assured but ‘very like a gentleman’, in Lord Clarendon’s opinion, ‘and more considerable than he [was] wont to do’. Disraeli felt sure that he had grown since he had last seen him two years before. ‘Sir Henry Holland says that he is five foot eight inches high, but, then, Sir Henry is not only a physician but a courtier,’ Disraeli told his friend, Mrs Brydges Willyams. ‘However, the Prince certainly looks taller than I ever expected he would turn out to be.’ He was, in fact, as A.J. Munby had estimated, five foot seven inches, though he appeared taller because of the high heels he had fixed to his size eight boots.
He was wearing a uniform expertly made for him by Henry Poole of Savile Row and the insignia of a general, a rank to which he had been promoted on his twenty-first birthday. The cloak of the Order of the Garter hung from his shoulders and its gold collar round his neck. As he waited at the altar with his brother-in-law, the Crown prince of Prussia, on one side and his uncle, the somewhat mollified Duke of Coburg, on the other, he was seen to cast a series of nervous glances at the gallery where his mother sat with her ladies. She was ‘agitated and restless’, Lady Augusta recorded, moving her chair, putting back her long streamers, asking questions of the Duchess of Sutherland. Her expression was ‘profoundly melancholy’. When the organ played the first anthem and Jenny Lind sang in the chorale which had been composed by Prince Albert, Charles Kingsley, one of the Queen’s Chaplains in Ordinary, who was ‘exactly opposite to her the whole time’, saw her throw back her head and look ‘up and away with a most painful’ expression on her face. Norman McLeod, a Dean of the Chapel Royal, who was standing next to Kingsley, touched him on the arm, and, with tears in his eyes, whispered in his ‘broad Scotch’, ‘See, she is worshipping him in spirit!’
McLeod drew Kingsley’s attention also to the bridegroom’s sisters, for ‘the blessed creatures’ were all crying. As Kingsley’s daughter, Rose, reported on her parents’ evidence, the Princess Royal had burst out crying ‘as soon as the Prince of Wales came up to the Altar’. And this ‘set Princess Alice (who looked quite beautiful) and all her sisters off crying and blubbering too: but it was only from affection and they soon recovered themselves’.