QUEEN VICTORIA Continued from Page 24
reciprocal passion were not his.” Though “Victorianism” has become a code word for sexual propriety, Victoria and Albert seem to have pushed the envelope of that propriety. Victoria was constantly preg- nant, and the loving couple introduced nine children into the world, all of whom sur- vived to adulthood. The intelligent, talented, and hard-working Prince Albert took on an increasingly wide range of public functions. The Great Exhibition of the Art and Industry of All Nations, taking place in the Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and now regarded as the world’s first trade fair, owed much of its success to his ideas, enthusiasm, and leadership.
Prince Albert
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When Albert died in 1861 at the age of 42 (of- ficially of typhoid fever, but modern research in- dicates it may have been stomach cancer), Victoria was crushed. So was the British populace, who re- alized how much Albert had given to Great Britain, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli summed up the general feeling when he wrote in his journal, “With Prince Albert we have buried our Sovereign. This German Prince has governed Eng- land for 21 years with a wisdom and energy such
as none of our Kings have ever shown.” Vic- toria reigned for 40 more years, but so great was her mourning for her husband that she neglected many of her duties, including public appearances, until the late 1860s, and wore black for the rest of her life. There had been hints in Victoria’s early life of a morbid fascination with death; this obsession came to full bloom shortly after Albert’s death. In Victoria: An Intimate Bi- ography, biographer Stanley Weintraub writes: “For years she would sleep with his nightshirt in her arms. Every night there- after [his death], she knelt at Albert’s side of their bed before she put her head on her own pillow . . . . Her precious cast of Albert’s hand, made in happier days, would be kept in their bedroom, near her. In each of their homes, his dressing room or study would be kept as it had been, even to the changing of linens, the daily replacement of towels and nightclothes, and—in the dressing rooms— the bringing of hot water for shaving each morning, and a scouring of the unused chamber pot. Yet each room would continue to be used in some way by Victoria.”
Author Michael Harrison provides a broader perspective: “. . . in Victoria’s stage- managed pretense that her dead husband was still a member of the household there was something so primitive that one was re- minded of the elaborate domestic furnish- ings of Egyptian and Etruscan tombs: as elaborate an attempt to keep the dead ‘alive’—and as patently useless.”
The “table-tappng” Spiritualism of the U.S.’s Fox sisters had leapt across the At- lantic in 1851; ever since, there had been in- tense interest in England and France in com- municating with the dead. The court of Queen Victoria was not immune from such influences. Two years after Albert’s death, ru- mors flew that Victoria had summoned to Windsor Castle the Hinckley, Leicestershire- born medium Robert James Lees.
Lees was only 14 at the time; he would later be- come a scholar, philan- thropist, and friend of prime ministers Glad- stone and Disraeli. He had given evidence of psychic abilities from an early age, reportedly seeing a kilted Highlander sitting by his bed when he was three. When he was 13 or 14 (in 1862 or 1863), he con- ducted a séance at which he was said to have re- ceived, through an uni- dentified spirit guide, a message from Prince Albert.
Elizabeth Longford continues the story in Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed: “James Burns, editor of The Medium and Daybreak, put a para- graph in his paper de-
scribing the séance and dispatched it to the widowed Queen. She decided to test the boy’s bona fides by sending two Court offi- cials incognito to the next séance. Lees again went under control [subjected himself to spirit guides], greeted the courtiers by their true titles, gave them the highest Masonic handshake and asked what Queen Victoria wanted. ‘She wants a name,’ they replied. Young Lees wrote down the secret pet-name with which the Prince Consort always signed letters to his wife, returning it to her in a sealed envelope.” An article in The Two Worlds for August 1949 declares: “This led to a series of séances given to Queen Victoria at which Prince Al- bert gave convincing evidence of his identity, and his continued interest in the Queen and of this country. This led to a request to re- main permanently at the court in order that the Prince Consort might be regularly com- municated with concerning matters of state. Acting under the advice of his chief control, the request was declined, but John Brown, a
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