Book Two: Constitution Hill Part Two: Constitution Hill Characters
Chapter Six
A Hundred Yards
Prince Albert. London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Wednesday, 10 June 1840.
On 10 June 1840 the Queen rode out from Buckingham Palace in an open carriage with Prince Albert, as she did most afternoons, up Constitution Hill towards Hyde Park Corner. A young man named Edward Oxford stepped from the crowd along the route and fired. Victoria was struck and died of her wounds. She was twenty-one, she had been married four months, and she was four months pregnant.
He had been at Woolwich all afternoon, and came back at five with his head full of guns.
They had shown him the Arsenal, and the gun wharf, and a great many very large cannon lying on the ground in rows like sleeping cattle, and a young officer of artillery had explained to him the principles of the elevating screw with such enthusiasm that Albert had asked him three questions he did not need answered, for the pleasure of watching him answer them. He liked Woolwich. He liked any place where men made things carefully and could tell him how. He rode back through the dust of the Kent road with his equerry beside him, thinking about the elevating screw and how it might be improved, and came in at the Palace with his coat grey to the shoulders, and went up to change, and found that he was happy, in the plain uncomplicated way that he had not often been in England, and did not examine it.
The Queen was in her sitting room with Lord Melbourne and the boxes. He heard Melbourne’s laugh through the door as he passed, the lazy rumble of it, and her laugh answering. He did not go in. He had stopped minding about the door, or had very nearly stopped, since the week of Exeter Hall; there were other doors, and he had begun to find them. Stockmar said that it was a matter of years and not of weeks, and Stockmar was generally right about the time things took, and wrong only about how much one minded while they took it.
At half past five Melbourne came out, and bowed to him in the corridor, and said something kind about Woolwich, of which he had evidently heard; Melbourne always heard. Then he went off down the stairs with his hat in his hand, humming, a big heavy man going out into a fine June afternoon; and Albert went in to her.
She was standing at the window. She was dressed to go out, in a summer gown and a light shawl, with her bonnet on the chair beside her, and she turned when he came in and held out both her hands to him, as she always did, as if he had been away a week.
“You are covered in dust,” she said. “You smell of horse. Was it very interesting? Lord Melbourne says they showed you everything and you asked about everything and the officers were enchanted. I said of course they were.”
He told her about the elevating screw. She did not understand it and did not pretend to, and listened with her head on one side, watching his face, which was what she did when she did not understand a thing and wished him to go on talking. She was four months gone with the child now and it showed, a little, under the loose gown, and she had stopped minding that it showed. She had been well for a month, and happy for a month, and she had her colour back.
“We shall go to Mamma’s,” she said, “and then round the Park, and be home for dinner. It is such a beautiful day. I have ordered the Drotschky.”
The carriage was at the garden door at six: the little low open one that she called the Drotschky, as if it were a joke between them, which it was. It was hardly higher than a gig, and open all round, with a single seat for two, and four bays harnessed to it with two postilions in the royal livery; two outriders in front, and one behind. The equerries were not there. Colonel Buckley and Sir Edward Bowater, whose business was to ride one at each hind wheel, had gone across the garden to save themselves the long way round, meaning to join the carriage at the top of Constitution Hill; and nobody thought anything of it, because there had never been any reason to.
She sat on the left, and he on the right, which was not their usual way; she generally sat on the right. But she had come down first and gone to the left side without thinking, and he handed her up there, and did not ask her to move, and she did not offer; and afterwards he could not have said why, any more than he could have said why one puts on the left shoe first. They drove out by the wooden gate of the north wing and turned left, up the hill.
It was a fine warm afternoon, a little after six, with the sun low in front of them at the top of the hill and the shadows of the trees lying long down the road behind. On their left ran the high brick wall of the Palace garden, with the tops of the trees showing over it; on their right, the iron railings of the Green Park, and the footpath beside them, and the people. There were always people. They came every fine afternoon to wait for the Queen, because she drove up this road every fine afternoon, and they had learnt her hours as Londoners learnt everything, without being told; and they stood along the railings in their twos and threes, clerks and nursemaids and idle young men and old women with baskets, and took off their hats and bobbed as she went by, and she bowed to them, and they were pleased. Albert had grown fond of them. He thought of them as a kind of hedge.
They had gone perhaps a hundred yards. The Queen had turned to her left to look at a horse that somebody was leading along under the garden wall, a handsome grey, and was saying something about it. Albert was looking the other way, at the footpath on his own side, because he always did; and he saw, on the footpath, standing a little apart from the rest, a small young man in a brown coat, holding something out towards them at arm’s length.
He did not have time to see what it was.
The noise was enormous. It was so loud, and so near, that for a moment he did not hear it as a noise at all but felt it, as one feels a blow, in the face and the chest and the bones of the head; and then his ears were ringing, and the horses had started and plunged, and the carriage had stopped dead, and there was smoke drifting across the road, white and stinking, between him and the railings.
The Queen had turned back to him. She did not understand what had happened; she had been looking at the grey horse, and could not think why her ears were ringing, and she looked at him with her eyebrows up, and her mouth open a little, as if to ask whether it was a salute.
He took both her hands. He said, “Are you hurt? Did it frighten you?” and she laughed. She actually laughed, at the noise, at his face, at the plunging horses; and he thought, she is not hurt, and something in him that had stopped began to go again.
Then he looked back at the man.
The man had not run away. That was the strange thing, the thing Albert remembered most clearly afterwards and could least explain. He stood where he had stood, on the footpath, six paces off, with his back to the railings, and he had folded his arms across his chest; and there was a pistol in each hand, one smoking and one not. He did not look frightened. He did not look angry. He looked, Albert thought, like an actor in a provincial theatre who has delivered a speech and is waiting for the applause, and the whole attitude was so affected, so stagey, so absurd, that for a moment Albert was very nearly amused. He remembered that too, afterwards. He remembered it for the rest of his life.
The man turned his head and looked behind him, quickly, as if to see whether anyone was coming. Then he faced round again, and unfolded his arms, and brought up the second pistol in his left hand, across the first.
Four seconds. Afterwards, when they asked him, as they asked him again and again, Albert said that it had been four seconds, perhaps five, from the moment the man raised the second pistol to the moment he fired it; and he believed that, and he also knew that it was not true, because it had taken the whole of his life.
He turned to her. He took her hand and squeezed it and said, “My God! Don’t be alarmed,” which was the most foolish thing he had ever said; and she said, “I am not the least frightened,” which was true. And then, because she was the Queen, and was not frightened, and wished to see what was happening on her own road in her own capital, she half rose in the carriage and turned to look at the man.
He reached for her. He meant to pull her down, below the side of the carriage, against himself. His hand was on her arm.
The second shot was louder than the first.
She sat down again. That was all she did, at first; she sat down, quite suddenly, as if somebody had pushed her, and leaned against him, and put her hand up to her breast, below the collarbone, on the right side, where the shawl was. She looked surprised. Then she took her hand away and looked at it.
Afterwards he could not remember a great deal of what happened next, and what he did remember came in pieces, sharp and separate, like things seen by lightning.
He remembered the people along the railings, who had stood frozen at the first shot, all coming at once upon the man in the brown coat, a great dark knot of them, and a young man holding up two pistols above the knot as if they were something he had won. He remembered a policeman climbing over the spiked railings from the Park side, and tearing his hand on them. He remembered somebody shouting the Queen, the Queen, over and over, in a high voice, a woman’s or a boy’s. He remembered the outrider behind them, Brown, off his horse and at the wheel with his face the colour of paper.
He remembered his own voice, very loud, calling to the postilion: not go on, which the postilion was waiting to be told, but back; turn back; the Palace. The road was wide just there, and the postilions turned the four horses in it, sawing at their mouths, the wheels scraping, while he held her; and then they were going back down the hill, at a gallop, with the wall flying past on the right now and the railings on the left, and the crowd scattering in front of them, the whole hundred yards in no time at all, and the wooden gate of the north wing still standing open as they had left it.
He remembered that she said, on the way down, quite clearly, “Albert, the shawl is spoiled,” and that he said it did not matter, and that she said that it was the Indian one, and that he said it did not matter, and held her.
He carried her up the stairs himself. Nobody stopped him. He did not think afterwards that anybody had thought of stopping him; there were people everywhere suddenly, footmen and pages and maids and a gentleman of the household he did not know, all running, and all of them stood aside. She was very light. He had not known how light she was. He laid her on her bed in her own room, and knelt by her, and held the shawl folded against the place below her collarbone, hard, as he had seen a man do once at Bonn when a student was hurt in a duel, because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
Sir James Clark came at half past six, with his coat unbuttoned. Dr Locock came a little after, because of the child; and Sir Benjamin Brodie, the Serjeant-Surgeon, at a quarter to seven, grey and quiet and very quick, with a bag that a man carried behind him. They put Albert out of the room while they looked at her. He stood in the corridor with his back to the wall and his hands, which were not clean, held out a little in front of him, and the Baroness came and stood beside him and did not say anything, and after a while took his hands in hers and wiped them with her own handkerchief, one finger at a time, as she must have done for the Queen when the Queen was five years old. He let her.
When they let him in again he knew from their faces.
Brodie told him, in the next room, standing by the window, very simply and very kindly, in the voice of a man who has said the same thing a great many times to a great many people and has never learnt a better way of saying it. The ball had gone in below the collarbone and had not come out. He had searched for it and could not reach it, and would not search further, because it would only hurt her. It had broken something inside, among the great vessels at the root of the neck, and she was bleeding where nobody could get at it. He did not think that it would be long. He thought that it would be some hours. He thought that she would not suffer very much more than she was suffering now, and that she would grow sleepy towards the end. He was very sorry.
“And the child,” Albert said.
Brodie looked at Dr Locock, who had come to the door. Dr Locock shook his head.
The Duchess of Kent came at a quarter past seven. Somebody had ridden to Belgrave Square, to the house where they had been driving, to fetch her; and she came up the stairs with her bonnet in her hand and her face fallen in, and went past Albert without seeing him, and into the room, and down on her knees by the bed. The Queen opened her eyes and saw her mother there and said, “Mamma,” in a small, surprised voice, as if her mother had come into the nursery at Kensington at an hour when she was not expected; and the Duchess put her face down on the coverlet and wept.
They had not been on speaking terms, half the time, for three years. Albert had been married to that silence for four months and knew every inch of it. It did not seem to be in the room now. He thought that perhaps it had never been as large as it had looked.
The light went slowly. Outside, beyond the closed windows, the evening was still fine; he could see the tops of the trees in the garden, and the sky going gold and then green, and swallows. Somewhere below, beyond the house, there was a noise that went on and on and that he could not account for, until somebody told him that it was the carriages: half London had heard by now, and was coming to the Palace to ask, and the line of carriages was halfway down the Mall. Somebody told him, too, at some point in the evening, the young man’s name, and that he had been taken to the station-house, and that he had asked whether the Queen was hurt. Albert heard the name. He did not keep it.
She was awake for a long time. She was in pain, and then less pain, after they gave her something, and then she was sleepy, as Brodie had said she would be, and her breath came short and quick and shallow, like a bird’s. She did not speak much. She asked for the window to be opened, because it was so warm, and it was opened, and the noise of the carriages came in, and she listened to it for a while with her eyes shut and said, “Are they all asking?” and he said that they were, and she seemed pleased.
Once she said, “Was it the man by the railings?” and he said that it was; and she said, “He had a brown coat,” and he said that he had; and she was quiet for a little, and then said, “I thought he was going to give me a letter.”
Once she said, “Lord M. will be so cross.”
And once, late, when the room had gone dim and the candles had been brought, she opened her eyes and looked about her, as if she had lost something, and found him kneeling on her right, by the head of the bed, where the doctors had put him so that they could get at her; and she moved her eyes, very slightly, to her left.
He got up, and went round the bed, and knelt down on her left side, where she wanted him. She did not say anything. She put her hand in his and kept it there.
Melbourne came up at nine.
He had been in the house since before seven, Albert learnt afterwards, downstairs, with the Lord Chamberlain and the Clerk of the Council, doing the things that would have to be done; and he had not come up, because there was nothing for him to do upstairs. Albert did not hear him on the stairs. He looked up and Melbourne was in the doorway, with the light of the corridor behind him, very large and quite still, with his hat in his hand; and he had not come any further into the room than the doorway, and he did not. He stood there. His face, which Albert had only ever seen amused, was not amused.
She did not see him. Her eyes were shut. Her breath had changed, and the doctors had drawn back a little from the bed, as if by agreement, and the Duchess was holding her other hand, and the Baroness was standing at the foot of the bed with her hands folded in front of her, perfectly upright, as she had stood at the foot of the Queen’s bed, in one house or another, for sixteen years. Nobody spoke. Outside, the carriages had gone quiet, or he had stopped hearing them.
A little after nine o’clock, with the doctors there and her hand in his, the Queen died. She was twenty-one years old, and had been married seventeen weeks and two days; and the child died with her.
Somebody stopped the clock. He did not see who. Somebody drew the curtains across the window, and the room went dark, and then lighter again as the candles took hold.
The Duchess of Kent was led out, weeping, by two of her ladies. Dr Locock and Sir James Clark stood by the window, talking in low voices about what must be done, and to whom it must be reported, and in what form; there were forms for this as for everything, and the forms had begun already, and he could hear them beginning. Brodie washed his hands in a basin and dried them, slowly, on a towel, and put down the towel, and did not seem to know what to do next either.
Melbourne had come into the room at last. He stood at the foot of the bed with the Baroness, looking down, and his lips moved, and Albert thought that he might be praying, and then thought that he was not the kind of man who prayed, and then did not know what he thought. Then Melbourne turned his head and spoke in a low voice to a gentleman who had come in behind him, the Lord Chamberlain, about the Privy Council, and the Archbishop, and the Lords Justices, and the King. He said the King. He said it as a man takes up a thing he put down three years before and had not thought to need again; and the Lord Chamberlain bowed, and went out quickly, and Albert understood that somewhere in Hanover, at that moment, a scarred old man who had refused his consent to Albert’s precedence, and called him a paper Royal Highness, was King, of this country and of this house, and did not know it yet.
Then Melbourne looked at him. It was a long look, and a very kind one, and it was the look one gives a man who has nowhere to go.
Albert was still kneeling by the bed, on her left side, with her hand in his. He had been put there. That was the only reason he was there, and the only right he had to be there, or anywhere in that house: she had moved her eyes, very slightly, and he had gone where she showed him, as he had gone to her left hand at the levee in February, in front of the whole Court, with nobody’s leave but hers. There had never been any other leave. Parliament had declined to give him a place, and the King of Hanover had declined to allow him one. The only place in England that was his had been the place at her side, and it had been exactly as large as she was.
He looked down at her hand, and at his own around it.
After a while the Baroness came round the bed, and touched his shoulder, and said in German, very gently, that he must get up now, because the women had things to do; and he got up, because she asked him to, and because there was nobody else in the house now whom he had to obey.