The Princess’s distress was piteous; yet she behaved admirably, Lady Macclesfield thought, composed and self-controlled, never thinking of herself but ‘as gentle and considerate to everyone as ever’. She had naturally been much upset by the Mordaunt trial and very cross with her ‘naughty little man’ for getting himself involved with it. But that was all over now. She scarcely ever left the house except to pray in the church in the park or when the doctors insisted that she get a breath of fresh air. At night she lay down sleepless in her husband’s dressing-room. Her sister-in-law, Princess Alice, who had come to Sandringham for the Prince’s birthday, was there to help her; but she found Alice a bossy woman, more of a trial than a comfort. Prince Alfred was there, too, though Prince Leopold, who was ‘dreadfully anxious’ to come as he believed he could comfort his sister-in-law, was told to keep away.
The Queen arrived on 29 November. And the next day the Prince grew suddenly worse. For the first time the Princess broke down, ‘almost distracted with grief and alarm’. On 1 December, however, he seemed sufficiently recovered for the Queen to leave Sandringham; and by 7 December the Princess felt able to leave the house with Princess Alice for a drive in a sledge drawn over the snow by two ponies. But that day the fever ‘lighted up’ and began all over again, ‘as bad as ever or worse,’ Lady Macclesfield reported to her husband, adding later, ‘worse and worse; the doctors say that if he does not rally within the next hour a very few more must see the end.’ Lord Granville informed the Queen that there did not seem any hope left. She hurried back to Sandringham.
That Sunday, a day appointed by the Church as one of national prayer for his recovery, he seemed slightly better. Yet as The Times reported in a leading article next morning: ‘The Prince still lives, and we may still therefore hope; but the strength of the patient is terribly diminished, and all who watch his bedside — as, indeed, all England watches it — must acknowledge that their minds are heavy with apprehension.’
The apprehension was not relieved by the doctors’ bulletins, five of which were issued during the course of that day, inspiring a poet — usually supposed, though perhaps mistakenly, to be Alfred Austin — to write those lines that were to confer upon him an immortality which all Austin’s later writings would certainly have denied him:
Across the wires, the electric message came:
‘He is no better; he is much the same.’
At seven o’clock that evening Queen Victoria was woken from a brief slumber and warned that her son was not expected to live through the night. The next morning, however, he was again a little improved, strong enough to talk and sing, to whistle and laugh in raving delirium before falling back breathless against the pillows. For thirty-six hours he continued in this state, shouting at his attendants, ordering alarming reforms in his Household now that he had — as he supposed — succeeded to the throne, calling out to Dr William Gull, ‘That’s right old Gull — one more teaspoonful’, hurling his pillows into the air and once knocking over the Princess, who had been advised not to enter the room as her presence excited him dreadfully but who attempted to circumvent the danger by crawling through the door on her hands and knees. The Queen came into the room to watch her son from behind a screen.
By now numerous other members of the family, including Prince Leopold, had been summoned to Sandringham, which was soon so overcrowded that Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice had to sleep in the same bed. Outside it was bitterly cold. All the windows had to be kept shut, and this led to the air inside becoming so stale that the Duke of Cambridge detected what he described as an ominous smell of drains in the atmosphere. He rushed about the house, sniffing in corners, and jumping up with a startled cry of ‘By George, I won’t sit here!’ when Knollys said that he, too, had noticed a bad smell in the library. Henry Ponsonby suggested that with so many people sitting about all day in rooms hermetically sealed there was bound to be a fusty smell. But the Duke remained ‘wild on the subject’ and continued to create alarm by examining ‘all the drains of the house’ until a man came from the gas company and discovered a leaking pipe.
Although Lady Macclesfield thought her ‘charming, so tender and quiet’, the Queen seemed to cause the Duke quite as much alarm as the prospect of catching typhoid. One day Henry Ponsonby was taking a stroll in the garden with Prince Alfred’s equerry when they ‘were suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties, headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold, going as fast as they could’. Ponsonby thought that a mad bull must be on the rampage. But the stampeding royalties ‘cried out: “The Queen! the Queen!” and [everyone] dashed into the house again and waited behind the door till the road was clear’.
They certainly were an ‘extraordinary family’, decided Lady Macclesfield, who found it ‘quite impossible to keep a house quiet as long as it is swarming with people and really the way in which they all squabble and wrangle and abuse each other destroys one’s peace’. Some of them were despondent, others optimistic. The Queen, obsessed by memories of ‘ten years ago’ when the Prince Consort died at this very same time of the year, did not have much confidence, so she confessed in her journaclass="underline" ‘Somehow I always look for bad news.’ Prince Alfred and Prince Arthur, on the other hand, talked as if their brother ‘were fit to go out shooting tomorrow’.
On 13 December it seemed for a time that he would never go out shooting again, but the ‘dreadful moment passed,’ the Queen recorded.
‘Poor Alix was in the greatest alarm and despair, and I supported her as best I could. Alice and I said to one another in tears, “There can be no hope”.’ Later the Queen sat by his bed, hardly knowing ‘how to pray aright, only asking God if possible to spare [her] Beloved Child’.
Her prayers were answered. The next day he was brought back from the ‘very verge of the grave’; and on 15 December when she went into the room he smiled, kissed her hand in ‘his old way’, and said, ‘Oh! dear Mama, I am so glad to see you. Have you been here all this time?’ Soon afterwards he asked for a glass of Bass’s beer.
From that day onwards, sleeping for much of the time, the Prince gradually recovered his strength. He and his wife were ‘never apart’, the Princess contentedly told Princess Louise. ‘Never, never’ could she thank God enough for all His Mercy when He listened to her prayers and gave her back her ‘life’s happiness’. All her time was devoted to her ‘darling husband who thank God [was] really getting on wonderfully’, she wrote to Lady Macclesfield: ‘This quiet time we two have spent here together now has been the happiest days of my life, my full reward after all my sorrow and despair. It has been our second honeymoon and we are both so happy to be left alone by ourselves.’
The children had been sent to Osborne, and, at the beginning of February 1872, the Prince was well enough to join them there. Just before he left, all the tenants on the estate put their signatures to a ‘very respectful and affectionate address’ which the Rector, the Revd Lake Onslow, read out at a little ceremony, expressing the pleasure they all felt at his recovery. The Princess ‘broke down in the speech she made in return,’ one of the tenants recorded, ‘and Mr Onslow nearly did the same’. The Prince was ‘quite himself’ again, the Queen told the Crown Princess, ‘only gentler and kinder than ever; and there is something different which I can’t exactly express. It is like a new life — all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage. He is constantly with Alix, and they seem hardly ever apart!!!’