Queen Victoria's Excessive Mourning

The death of Prince Albert on 14th December 1861 had a profound effect on his family. It often seems to me that in the midst of Queen Victoria’s excessive mourning, the effects on Prince Albert’s children have been overlooked. The video at the end of this post points out some of the implications.

Another thought often occurs to me, which might be a little more controversial. The story of Victoria and Albert is seen as one of the great royal love stories of all time and I do not doubt for a moment that the Queen adored her ‘beloved angel’ but there is something about the excesses of her mourning (including her refusal to be cajoled from it – she actually wrote to her daughter, Vicky, that she enjoyed thinking of her sorrow!) that gives me the impression of ‘she doth protest too much’. Queen Victoria, it seems to me, was what is now called co-dependent. Her love – though genuine – was perhaps not in the least what might be called real/mature love in which the object of one’s affection is seen as a person in his/her own right with his/her own needs. When Queen Victoria loved someone, she ‘needed’ them and, in some ways, seemed to sap the life from them. It is interesting, though very sad, that Prince Albert, John Brown and Disraeli were all such men, and, though the Queen would do anything to defend and support them, such support seems to spring more from a need in herself, rather than a mature, respectful acceptance and love of another individual. It might even be said that her treatment of Melbourne was the precursor for this. She so needed him that she was prepared to cast the constitution aside and override parliament, even putting the monarchy at risk in order to keep him by her. It was not only with those to whom she formed a romantic attachment, however, that she behaved in this way. Her reluctance to allow her daughter, Beatrice, to marry, and then her insistence that Beatrice and her husband remain living with her, is a similar example. “I must have a daughter with me...” she wrote to Vicky.

 Another interest fact is that in March 1861, the death of Victoria’s mother threw her into a state of utter despair to the extent that even beloved Albert felt compelled to tell her to basically ‘pull herself together’. There was a great deal of guilt involved in her sorrow, due to her disregard of her mother in the immediate years following her accession. Did she also feel a sense of guilt around Albert’s death? Is that why she went to overboard on preserving his memory?

Queen Victoria is someone whom I admire immensely, and none of this is meant as a criticism – merely as an observation. The starkness of her childhood, the cruelty of John Conroy and the early death of her father seem to have left her as a very needy person. At no time in her adult life was she without a ‘prop’ – whether it was Melbourne or the Munshi – and such was her dependence on these people that when they died (not the Munshi! He outlived her!) she truly felt as though a part of her own soul/being had been wrenched from her.

(As an aside, I do not believe Albert died of typhoid:   Prince Albert and Typhoid - A Myth?  )