Chief Mourner

She lay for nineteen days in the Bow Room, on the ground floor, with the long windows on the garden shuttered and the candles burning day and night; and it was the room in which, in November, she had stood up before her Privy Council with a paper shaking in her hand and declared her intention of marrying him.

He had not known that until the second day, when Anson told him, not meaning anything by it. Afterwards he could not stop knowing it. He went in every night at eleven, when the household had gone up and the doors were shut, and sat with her for an hour on a hard chair by the trestles, with the coffin under its pall and the candles guttering in the draught from the garden, and the two gentlemen-at-arms who kept the door standing as still as furniture; and he looked at the place by the fireplace where, Anson said, she had stood with her paper, and tried to think what she had looked like, standing there, and could not, because he had not been in the room. He had been at Coburg, in November, reading her letters.

Stockmar had told him about the hour at eleven. Stockmar had been Uncle Leopold’s physician in 1817, and had been in the house at Claremont on the night Princess Charlotte died, and had sat up with Leopold afterwards; and he told Albert, on the third evening, in his flat, careful German, without being asked, how it had been done then: how the Prince Leopold had gone in to her every night at eleven, alone, until they took her to Windsor, and had sat with her, and come out, and gone to bed, and got up in the morning and done whatever there was to do. He did not say that Albert should do the same. He said that it had been found to help. Albert did it, and found that it did not help, and did it every night, because it was the only hour of the day that was his.

The rest of the day was not his. It belonged to the forms, and the forms were very many, and he found that he was grateful for them, as he had once been grateful for the fencing-floor at Bonn on the mornings when he could not think. There were letters to be answered, from every court in Europe, and he answered them in his own hand, in three languages. There were the household’s questions, which came to him now because they had nowhere else to go, and which he answered until the King’s people came and took them away. There were his father’s letters from Coburg, and Ernest’s, and Uncle Leopold’s from Brussels, which he read once each and put away. And there was the Earl Marshal’s order for the funeral, which came to him on the eleventh day, a long printed paper with the King’s alterations in the margin in a large black hand, and his own name in it, in capitals, in the middle of the procession: The Chief Mourner, His Royal Highness Prince Albert, in a long black cloak.

He had seen the King once.

It had been in the library at St James’s, on the twenty-second, for perhaps ten minutes, standing. He had gone there expecting the old man who had refused him his place in February, and called him in public a paper Royal Highness, and he had found an old man in a hussar’s uniform under the crape who looked at him with one eye and spoke to him in German, and held his hand, and could not speak for a while; and then had spoken again, in another voice, and sent him away. He did not know what to make of it. He had thought about it a great deal since and made nothing of it. The King had not sent for him again.

---

They took her away on the night of the twenty-ninth, at ten.

He stood at the door of the Bow Room in his long black cloak and watched them bring her out: twelve Yeomen of the Guard, in their red and gold, with crape on their partisans, carrying her between them, so slowly that it did not seem like movement at all, out through the hall and down the steps into the courtyard, where the hearse stood under the lamps with its eight black horses and its black plumes nodding. There was a squadron of the Life Guards drawn up across the court with their cloaks on and torches in their hands, and the torches flared and smoked in the still warm air, and the light ran up and down the breastplates; and beyond the open end of the court, where the railings were, and beyond the railings, in the dark of St James’s Park and the Mall, there was London, standing.

The child was with her. Locock had told him, very gently, on the second day, that it was so, and must be, and that it was usual; that there would be no separate coffin and no separate name, because there had never been a separate life. He had thought about that every night at eleven, sitting on the hard chair, more than about anything else. In the Earl Marshal’s long printed paper there was not a word of it.

They put her in the hearse. The doors were shut. The Lord Chamberlain came to him and said, in a low voice, that the carriages were ready, and that His Royal Highness would wish to take his place in the first mourning coach, behind the hearse; it was so ordered, as far as the gates of Windsor.

“I shall walk,” Albert said, “as far as the top of the hill.”

The Lord Chamberlain looked at him; and then, being a sensible man, and knowing when a thing was not worth arguing about, bowed, and went away, and came back with two of the equerries, and said that they would walk with him.

They were Colonel Buckley and Sir Edward Bowater. He knew why it was those two, and he saw in their faces that they knew he knew; and he said nothing, and they took their places, one at each hind wheel of the hearse, where they ought to have been on the tenth of June; and the Life Guards wheeled into column with their torches, and the trumpeters rode out at the head of it without a sound, and the hearse moved, and he walked.

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They went out by the garden gate of the north wing, the same wooden gate, standing open as it had stood on the tenth; and turned left, up the hill.

He had not been on the road since. He had driven to St James’s and back by the Mall, and to the Duchess of Kent’s by the other way, by Grosvenor Place; he had not been up Constitution Hill, on foot or otherwise, since he came down it at a gallop with her against his shoulder and the wall flying past on the wrong side. He had wondered, in the nineteen days, what it would be like to go up it again. He found that it was like nothing. It was a road. The garden wall went along on his left, dark and high, with the trees over it; and on his right ran the railings of the Green Park, and the footpath beside them, and the people.

They were there in thousands. They were there all the way up, on the footpath and along the railings and in the Park behind them, as far back as the torchlight reached and beyond it, in the dark, packed so close that the railings could not be seen for them; men and women and children, in black, or with black on them somewhere, a band on a sleeve or a ribbon on a bonnet, all with their heads bare; and they made no sound. He had heard London make every noise it could make, in the four months he had lived in it. He had heard it cheer her, and cheer him, and laugh, and shout, and sing the anthem until the windows shook. He had never heard it silent. It was the most frightening thing he had ever heard. There were the horses’ hoofs on the road, and the wheels of the hearse, and the harness creaking, and the torches roaring softly in the warm air, and the boots of the two equerries on either side of him; and under all of it, on both sides, all the way up the hill, a silence so complete that he could hear, through it, people breathing.

They had gone perhaps a hundred yards.

He knew the place without looking for it. He knew it as one knows a stair in the dark. It was on his right, on the footpath, by the railings, six paces off; and there were people standing on it now, as there had been people standing on it then, a little apart from the rest, a man and a woman and two children, with their hats in their hands, looking at the hearse go by. One of the children was crying. The woman had her hand on its head. He looked at them as he passed, and they looked at him, and he went on walking.

Somewhere in the crowd, a long way back in the dark of the Park, a single voice began to sing the hundredth psalm, an old man’s voice, cracked and slow; and a few others took it up, near him, and then a few more, and it went along the railings for a little way, very quietly, All people that on earth do dwell, and died out again, as if the people singing it had been ashamed to break the silence, and the silence came back.

At the top of the hill there was the arch, black against the sky, with the torches on it; and the Duke’s house beyond it, Apsley House, with every window dark and every blind down. The procession halted under the arch. The mourning coach was drawn up there, with its door open and its steps down; and the Lord Chamberlain came up the line, and stood by the door.

Albert stood for a moment in the road and looked back down the hill. He could see the torches going down it in a long double line, all the way to the Palace, and the dark mass of the people along the railings on the one side and the dark wall on the other, and the Palace itself at the bottom, with every window lit. He could not see the place from here. He thought that he would never be able to see it again from anywhere without knowing it, and that this was the last time in his life that he would walk up this hill; and he got into the coach, and the door was shut on him, and the procession moved on, out of London, towards Windsor.

---

He came back to London on the Wednesday, by road, in the afternoon, in an ordinary carriage, and went up to his rooms at the Palace, and sat down at his table, and found that he could not remember most of the funeral, and that what he did remember came in pieces, sharp and separate, like the things he remembered of the tenth of June.

He remembered the road. They had gone out by Knightsbridge, and along by the dark trees of Kensington Gardens, beyond which, somewhere, unlit, was the old palace where she had been born. They had gone through Kensington and Hammersmith and over the long flat road to Brentford, and through Brentford, and across Hounslow Heath in the small hours with the stars out and the torches burning down and being changed at the posting-houses; and there had been people the whole way. He had not expected it. He had thought that London would come to the hill, because London came to everything, and that after Hyde Park Corner there would be the dark and the road. There had been people at every crossroads, and in front of every inn, and at the doors of the cottages along the heath, standing in the road in the middle of the night with lanterns and candles in their hands; farmers and labourers and their wives, and old men brought out on chairs, and children held up to see, and all of them bareheaded, and none of them making a sound. In every village they came to, the church bell had been tolling. He heard the bells come up out of the dark in front of them, one after another, all the way across Middlesex, and fade away behind, and the next begin.

He had not slept. He had sat in the coach with his hands in his lap and looked out of the window at the faces going by in the lantern-light, and he had thought of Uncle Leopold, who had made a journey like this one on a November night twenty-three years ago, behind two hearses, the second for his son; and he had thought that he would write to Uncle Leopold the next day, and tell him that he had done it, and that the people had stood in the road; and then that Leopold would know it already, without being told, and that this was the only thing in the world he and Leopold now had entirely in common, and that he did not want it.

They had come into Windsor at a little before four, in the first grey of the morning, under the Castle on its hill, with the bells of the town going and the birds beginning in the elms of the Long Walk; and carried her in.

He remembered the chapel at night: St George’s, full from end to end, the banners of the Garter knights hanging dark over the stalls in the candlelight, the whole of the choir and the nave lined with black, and the faces above the black, peers and bishops and judges and gentlemen, all turned towards the door. He remembered walking in behind her, in the long cloak, with a duke on either side of him to support him, as the order prescribed, though he did not need supporting, and the train of the cloak carried behind him by somebody he never saw; and the choir singing the sentences, I am the resurrection and the life, and the sound going up into the roof and coming down again, very cold, so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He remembered the chair. There was a chair set for the chief mourner at the head of the coffin, in the choir, under the old King’s banner, and he sat in it, because the order said that he was to; and Sussex had sat in that chair for William the Fourth, they told him, and Leopold for Charlotte in the same place; and he sat in it for the whole of the service with his hands on his knees, a foot from her head, while the Dean read and the choir sang and the candles burned down, and did not look at anyone. Somewhere above him, in the royal closet by the altar, behind the glass, the Duchess of Kent was sitting with her ladies, because women did not walk; he knew she was there and did not look up.

He remembered the vault. There was a place in the floor of the choir where the stones had been lifted, and a dark stair going down under the floor; and at the words of the committal they let her down, slowly, on ropes, with a sound of machinery somewhere, into the dark, where the old King lay, and the other kings, and Charlotte with her son; and she went down out of the candlelight a foot at a time, and was gone, and the child with her, and there was only the hole in the floor.

He remembered Garter. Garter King of Arms stood at the edge of the vault in his tabard and read out her style, in a strong voice, into the dark after her, as was done: Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory life, unto His divine mercy, the late Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Princess Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith. And then, without stopping, in the same voice, as was also done, the other style: Let us humbly beseech Almighty God to bless and preserve with long life, health, and honour, and all worldly happiness, the Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Monarch, our Sovereign Lord Ernest the First, now, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, King of Hanover. God save the King.

And the whole chapel said it after him, God save the King, a thousand voices, low, all together, the way one says Amen; and Albert, sitting in his chair at the edge of the vault, found that he had said it too, without meaning to, because his mouth had been taught to say what was said around it.

He remembered the Lord Chamberlain, last of all, coming forward to the edge of the vault with his white staff of office in his two hands, and breaking it across his knee, with a crack that went up into the roof, and dropping the two halves down into the dark after her; because his office was hers, and had ended with her, and he would have a new staff from the King in the morning.

He did not remember coming out of the chapel. He supposed that he had.

---

On the Thursday he left the house.

Nobody asked him to. The King’s people had been very correct, all through the nineteen days, and very kind; and the Lord Chamberlain had told him, on the night of the procession, with great awkwardness, that His Royal Highness was of course to consider himself at liberty to remain at the Palace as long as he wished. But on the Wednesday afternoon, when he came back from Windsor, there had been men in the state rooms upstairs with lists and measuring-tapes, going quietly from room to room, and a man on a ladder in the hall taking down the arms over the door; and he had understood that a house of this kind belongs to whoever is wearing the Crown, and is lent to everyone else.

Cart packed for him. It did not take long. He found that he had very little in the house that was his own: his clothes, his books, his music, his guns, the dogs, the pictures he had brought from the Rosenau, the papers in his table; and the organ, which was his and which he left where it stood, because there was nowhere in Belgrave Square to put it. Eos lay across the threshold of his dressing room the whole morning, with her nose on her paws, and watched the boxes go out one by one, and would not be moved.

The Baroness came to say goodbye to him at noon. She was going home to Germany. She did not say when, or where, or on what; she had been twenty years in England, and had nothing in it now, and had evidently decided to go before anybody could tell her to. She stood in the doorway of his sitting room in her black, very upright, with her keys at her waist still, out of habit, though there was nothing left that they opened; and she said in German that she wished His Royal Highness well, and that she hoped he would remember that the Queen had loved him very much, and that she, the Baroness, had not always made it easy for her to do so, and was sorry for it now. He had disliked her for four months more than he had disliked anyone in his life. He took her hand, and kissed it, and found that he could not say anything, and she went away.

He drove to Belgrave Square at three in the afternoon, in a closed carriage, by Grosvenor Place, with Cart beside the coachman and Eos on the seat beside him with her head in his lap; out of the gate at the south end of the court, so as not to go by the garden gate of the north wing, and not by the hill. It was a mile. It took a quarter of an hour. Ingestre House stood at the corner of the square, a tall stucco house that the Duchess of Kent had taken in April because her brother-in-law of Hanover would not give up his rooms at St James’s to her; the house the two of them had been driving to on the tenth of June, at six in the afternoon, to pay a visit and take a turn round the Park and be home for dinner.

The Duchess was waiting for him in the hall, in her black, with her face fallen in and her eyes red. She held out her hands to him. He took them. Neither of them could think of anything to say, and they stood like that in the hall, with the servants carrying his boxes in past them, for some time; and then she said, in German, that his rooms were on the second floor, at the back, over the garden, and that she hoped he would find them quiet; and he said that he was sure he would; and she said that dinner was at seven; and he went up.

The rooms were quiet. There was a bed, and a table, and two chairs, and a window over a small square garden with a plane tree in it and a wall at the end, and beyond the wall the backs of other houses. He sat down in one of the chairs, with his hat still in his hand. Eos came and lay down across his feet. Somewhere below him a clock struck the half hour; and he sat there, in his mother-in-law’s house, in a room that had been got ready for him by people who did not know what else to do with him, and found that for the first time since the tenth of June there was nothing whatever that he was required to do next; and he did not know how he was going to bear it.