America, and it seemed as if England, owing to a violent quarrel with the

Northern States, was upon the point of being drawn into the conflict. A severe
despatch by Lord John Russell was submitted to the Queen; and the Prince

perceived that, if it was sent off unaltered, war would be the almost
inevitable consequence. At seven o'clock on the morning of December 1, he rose

from his bed, and with a quavering hand wrote a series of suggestions for the
alteration of the draft, by which its language might be softened, and a way

left open for a peacefulsolution of the question. These changes were accepted
by the Government, and war was averted. It was the Prince's last memorandum.

He had always declared that he viewed the prospect of death with equanimity.
"I do not cling to life," he had once said to Victoria. "You do; but I set no

store by it." And then he had added: "I am sure, if I had a severeillness, I
should give up at once, I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity of

life." He had judged correctly. Before he had been ill many days, he told a
friend that he was convinced he would not recover. He sank and sank.

Nevertheless, if his case had been properly understood and skilfully treated
from the first, he might conceivably have been saved; but the doctors failed

to diagnose his symptoms; and it is noteworthy that his principal physician
was Sir James Clark. When it was suggested that other advice should be taken,

Sir James pooh-poohed the idea: "there was no cause for alarm," he said. But
the strange illness grew worse. At last, after a letter of fierce remonstrance

from Palmerston, Dr. Watson was sent for; and Dr. Watson saw at once that he
had come too late The Prince was in the grip of typhoid fever. "I think that

everything so far is satisfactory," said Sir James Clark.[*]
[*] Clarendon, II, 253-4: "One cannot speak with certainty; but it is horrible

to think that such a life MAY have been sacrificed to Sir J. Clark's selfish
jealousy of every member of his profession." The Earl of Clarendon to the

Duchess of Manchester, December 17, 1861.
The restlessness and the acute suffering of the earlier days gave place to a

settled torpor and an ever--deepening gloom. Once the failing patient asked
for music--"a fine chorale at a distance;" and a piano having been placed in

the adjoining room, Princess Alice played on it some of Luther's hymns, after
which the Prince repeated "The Rock of Ages." Sometimes his mind wandered;

sometimes the distant past came rushing upon him; he heard the birds in the
early morning, and was at Rosenau again, a boy. Or Victoria would come and

read to him "Peveril of the Peak," and he showed that he could follow the
story, and then she would bend over him, and he would murmur "liebes Frauchen"

and "gutes Weibchen," stroking her cheek. Her distress and her agitation were
great, but she was not seriously frightened. Buoyed up by her own abundant

energies, she would not believe that Albert's might prove unequal to the
strain. She refused to face such a hideouspossibility. She declined to see

Dr. Watson. Why should she? Had not Sir James Clark assured her that all would
be well? Only two days before the end, which was seen now to be almost

inevitable by everyone about her, she wrote, full of apparent confidence, to
the King of the Belgians: "I do not sit up with him at night," she said, "as I

could be of no use; and there is nothing to cause alarm." The Princess Alice
tried to tell her the truth, but her hopefulness would not be daunted. On the

morning of December 14, Albert, just as she had expected, seemed to be better;
perhaps the crisis was over. But in the course of the day there was a serious

relapse. Then at last she allowed herself to see that she was standing on the
edge of an appalling gulf. The whole family was summoned, and, one after

another, the children took a silent farewell of their father. "It was a
terrible moment," Victoria wrote in her diary, "but, thank God! I was able to

command myself, and to be perfectly calm, and remained sitting by his side."
He murmured something, but she could not hear what it was; she thought he was

speaking in French. Then all at once he began to arrange his hair, "just as he
used to do when well and he was dressing." "Es kleines Frauchen," she

whispered to him; and he seemed to understand. For a moment, towards the
evening, she went into another room, but was immediately called back; she saw

at a glance that a ghastly change had taken place. As she knelt by the bed, he
breathed deeply, breathed gently, breathed at last no more. His features

became perfectly rigid; she shrieked one long wild shriek that rang through
the terror-stricken castle and understood that she had lost him for ever.

CHAPTER VII. WIDOWHOOD
I

The death of the Prince Consort was the central turning-point in the history
of Queen Victoria. She herself felt that her true life had ceased with her

husband's, and that the remainder of her days upon earth was of a twilight
nature--an epilogue to a drama that was done. Nor is it possible that her

biographer should escape a similar impression. For him, too, there is a
darkness over the latter half of that long career. The first forty--two years

of the Queen's life are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of
authentic information. With Albert's death a veil descends. Only occasionally,

at fitful and disconnected intervals, does it lift for a moment or two; a few
main outlines, a few remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all

conjecture and ambiguity. Thus, though the Queen survived her great
bereavement for almost as many years as she had lived before it, the chronicle

of those years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier life. We must
be content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.

The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming
personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European

importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature he
might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had he done so

it can hardly be doubted that the whole development of the English polity
would have been changed. Already at the time of his death he filled a unique

place in English public life; already among the inner circle of politicians he
was accepted as a necessary and useful part of the mechanism of the State.

Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his death as "a national calamity of
far greater importance than the public dream of," and lamented the loss of his

"sagacity and foresight," which, he declared, would have been "more than ever
valuable" in the event of an American war. And, as time went on, the Prince's

influence must have enormously increased. For, in addition to his intellectual
and moral qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme

advantage which every other holder of high office in the country was without:
he was permanent. Politicians came and went, but the Prince was perpetually

installed at the centre of affairs. Who can doubt that, towards the end of the
century, such a man, grown grey in the service of the nation, virtuous,

intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole life-time of
government, would have acquired an extraordinaryprestige? If, in his youth,

he had been able to pit the Crown against the mighty Palmerston and to come
off with equal honours from the contest, of what might he not have been

capable in his old age? What Minister, however able, however popular, could
have withstood the wisdom, the irreproachability, the vast prescriptive

authority, of the venerable Prince? It is easy to imagine how, under such a
ruler, an attempt might have been made to convert England into a State as

exactly organised, as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, and as
autocratically controlled, as Prussia herself. Then perhaps, eventually, under

some powerful leader--a Gladstone or a Bright--the democratic forces in the
country might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed in

which the Monarchy would have been shaken to its foundations. Or, on the other
hand, Disraeli's hypothetical prophecy might have come true. "With Prince

Albert," he said, "we have buried our... sovereign. This German Prince has
governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of

our kings have ever shown. If he had outlived some of our "old stagers" he
would have given us the blessings of absolute government."

The English Constitution--that indescribable entity--is a living thing,
growing with the growth of men, and assuming ever-varying forms in accordance

with the subtle and complex laws of human character. It is the child of wisdom
and chance. The wise men of 1688 moulded it into the shape we know, but the

chance that George I could not speak English gave it one of its essential
peculiarities--the system of a Cabinet independent of the Crown and

subordinate to the Prime Minister. The wisdom of Lord Grey saved it from
petrifaction and destruction, and set it upon the path of Democracy. Then

chance intervened once more; a femalesovereign happened to marry an able and
pertinacious man; and it seemed likely that an element which had been

quiescent within it for years--the element of irresponsible administrative
power--was about to become its predominant characteristic and to change

completely the direction of its growth. But what chance gave chance took away.
The Consort perished in his prime; and the English Constitution, dropping the

dead limb with hardly a tremor, continued its mysterious life as if he had
never been.

One human being, and one alone, felt the full force of what had happened. The
Baron, by his fireside at Coburg, suddenly saw the tremendousfabric of his

creation crash down into sheer and irremediable ruin. Albert was gone, and he
had lived in vain. Even his blackest hypochondria had never envisioned quite

so miserable a catastrophe. Victoria wrote to him, visited him, tried to
console him by declaring with passionateconviction that she would carry on

her husband's work. He smiled a sad smile and looked into the fire. Then he
murmured that he was going where Albert was--that he would not be long. He

shrank into himself. His children clustered round him and did their best to
comfort him, but it was useless: the Baron's heart was broken. He lingered for

eighteen months, and then, with his pupil, explored the shadow and the dust.
II

With appalling suddenness Victoria had exchanged the sereneradiance of
happiness for the utter darkness of woe. In the first dreadful moments those