At Frogmore, the great mausoleum, perpetually enriched,
was visited almost daily by the Queen when the Court
was at Windsor. But there was another, a more
secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite
of rooms which Albert had occupied in the Castle was
kept for ever shut away from the eyes of any save
the most privileged. Within those precincts everything
remained as it had been at the Prince’s death;
but the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded
that her husband’s clothing should be laid afresh,
each evening, upon the bed, and that, each evening,
the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he
were still alive; and this incredible rite was performed
with scrupulous regularity for nearly forty years.
Such was the inner worship; and still the flesh obeyed
the spirit; still the daily hours of labour proclaimed
Victoria’s consecration to duty and to the ideal
of the dead. Yet, with the years, the sense of
self-sacrifice faded; the natural energies of that
ardent being discharged themselves with satisfaction
into the channel of public work; the love of business
which, from her girlhood, had been strong within her,
reasserted itself in all its vigour, and, in her old
age, to have been cut off from her papers and her
boxes would have been, not a relief, but an agony
to Victoria. Thus, though toiling Ministers might
sigh and suffer, the whole process of government continued,
till the very end, to pass before her. Nor was
that all; ancient precedent had made the validity
of an enormous number of official transactions dependent
upon the application of the royal sign-manual; and
a great proportion of the Queen’s working hours
was spent in this mechanical task. Nor did she
show any desire to diminish it. On the contrary,
she voluntarily resumed the duty of signing commissions
in the army, from which she had been set free by Act
of Parliament, and from which, during the years of
middle life, she had abstained. In no case would
she countenance the proposal that she should use a
stamp. But, at last, when the increasing pressure
of business made the delays of the antiquated system
intolerable, she consented that, for certain classes
of documents, her oral sanction should be sufficient.
Each paper was read aloud to her, and she said at
the end “Approved.” Often, for hours
at a time, she would sit, with Albert’s bust
in front of her, while the word “Approved”
issued at intervals from her lips. The word came
forth with a majestic sonority; for her voice now—how
changed from the silvery treble of her girlhood—was
a contralto, full and strong.
IV
Copyrights
Queen Victoria from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
