DEATH OF THE DUCHESS OF KENT.
The Duchess of Kent was now seventy-five years of age. For the last
few years she had been in failing health, tenderly cared for by her
children. When she had been last in town she had not gone to her own
house, Clarence House, but had stayed with her daughter in the
cheerful family circle at Buckingham Palace.
A loss in her household fell heavily on the aged Duchess. Sir George
Cooper, her secretary, to whose services she had been used for many
years, a man three years her junior, died in February, 1860.
In March the Duchess underwent a surgical operation for a complaint
affecting her right arm and rendering it useless, so that the habits
of many years had to be laid aside, and she could no longer without
difficulty work, or write, or play on the piano, of which her musical
talent and taste had made her particularly fond. The Queen and the
Prince visited the Duchess at Frogmore on the 12th of March, and found
her in a suffering but apparently not a dangerous condition.
On the 15th good news, including the medical men's report and a letter
from Lady Augusta Bruce, the Duchess of Kent's attached lady-in-
waiting, came from Frogmore to Buckingham Palace, and the Queen and
the Prince went without any apprehension on a visit to the gardens of
the Horticultural Society at Kensington. Her Majesty returned alone,
leaving the Prince to transact some business. She was "resting quite
happily" in her arm-chair, when the Prince arrived with a message from
Sir James Clark that the Duchess had been seized with a shivering fit--
a bad symptom, from which serious consequences were apprehended.
In two hours the Queen, the Prince, and Princess Alice were at
Frogmore. "Just the same," was the sorrowful answer given by the
ladies and gentlemen awaiting them.
The Prince Consort went up to the Duchess's room and came back with
tears in his eyes; then the Queen knew what to expect. With a
trembling heart she followed her husband and entered the bedroom.
There "on a sofa, supported by cushions, the room much darkened," sat
the Duchess, "leaning back, breathing heavily in her silk dressing-
gown, with her cap on, looking quite herself"
For a second the sight of the dear familiar figure, so little changed,
must have afforded a brief reprieve, and lent a sense of almost glad
incredulity to the distress which had gone before. But the well-meant
whisper of one of the attendants of "_Ein sanftes ende_"
destroyed the passing illusion. "Seeing that my presence did not
disturb her," the Queen wrote afterwards, "I knelt before her, kissed
her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her
eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the
dreadful reality was before me that for the first time she did not
know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went
out to sob.... I asked the doctors if there was no hope; they said
they feared none whatever, for consciousness had left her.... It was
suffusion of water on the chest which had come on."
The long night passed in sad watching by the unconscious sufferer, and
in vain attempts at rest in preparation for the greater sorrow that
was in store.
A few months earlier, on the death of the King of Prussia, the Prince
Consort had written to his daughter that her experience exceeded his,
for he had never seen any person die. The Queen had been equally
unacquainted with the mournful knowledge which comes to most even
before they have attained mature manhood and womanhood. Now the loving
daughter knelt or stood by the mother who was leaving her without a
sign, or lay painfully listening to the homely trivial sounds which
broke the stillness of the night--the crowing of a cock, the dogs
barking in the distance; the striking of the old repeater which had
belonged to the Queen's father, that she had heard every night in her
childhood, but to which she had not listened for twenty-three years--
the whole of her full happy married life. She wondered with the vague
piteous wonder--natural in such a case--what her mother, would have
thought of her passing a night under her roof again, and she not to
know it?
In the March morning the Prince took the Queen from the room in which
she could not rest, yet from which she could not remain absent. When
she returned windows and doors were thrown open. The Queen sat down on
a footstool and held the Duchess's hand, while the paleness of death
stole over the face, and the features grew longer and sharper. "I fell
on my knees," her Majesty wrote afterwards, "holding the beloved hand
which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt
the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and
Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my
heart would break.... It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten
scene. Fainter and fainter grew the breathing; at last it ceased, but
there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed as they
had been for the last half-hour.... The clock struck half-past nine at
the very moment. Convulsed with sobs I fell on the hand and covered it
with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room,
himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as
his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over;
he said, "Yes." I went into the room again after a few minutes and
gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had done before,
but was already white. Oh, God! how awful, how mysterious! But what a
blessed end. Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over."
By the Prince's advice the Queen went at once to the late Duchess's
sitting-room, where it was hard to bear the unchanged look of
everything, "Chairs, cushions ... all on the tables, her very work-
basket with her work; the little canary bird which she was so fond of,
singing!"
In one of the recently published letters of Princess Alice to the
Queen, the former recalled after an interval of eight years the words
which her father had spoken to her on the death of her grandmother,
when he brought the daughter to the mother and said, "Comfort mamma,"
a simple injunction which sounded like a solemn charge in the sad
months to come.
The melancholy tidings of the loss were conveyed by the Queen's hand
to the Duchess's elder daughter, the Princess of Hohenlohe; to the
Duchess's brother, the King of the Belgians--the last survivor of his
family--and to her eldest grand-daughter, the Crown Princess of
Prussia.
The moment the Princess Royal heard of the death she started for
England, and arrived there two days afterwards.
The unaffected tribute of respect paid by the whole country, led by
the Houses of Parliament, to the virtues of the late Duchess, was very
welcome to the mourners. The Duchess of Kent by her will bequeathed
her property to the Queen, and appointed the Prince Consort her sole
executor. "He was so tender and kind," wrote the Queen, "so pained to
have to ask me distressing questions, but spared me so much.
Everything done so quickly and feelingly."
The funeral took place on the 25th of March, in the vault beneath St.
George's Chapel, Windsor. The Prince Consort acted as chief mourner,
and was supported by two of the grandchildren of the late Duchess, the
Prince of Wales and the Prince of Leiningen. The pallbearers were six
ladies; among whom was Lady Augusta Bruce. Neither the Queen nor her
daughters were present. They remained, in the Queen's words, "to pray
at home together, and to dwell on the happiness and peace of her who
was gone." On the evening of the funeral the Queen and the Prince
dined alone; afterwards he read aloud to her letters written by her
mother to a German friend, giving an account of the illness and death
of the Duke of Kent more than forty years before. The Queen continued
the allowances which the Duchess of Kent had made to her elder
daughter, the Princess Hohenlohe, and to two of the duchess's
grandsons, Prince Victor Hohenlohe and Prince Edward Leiningen. Her
Majesty pensioned the Duchess's servants, and appointed Lady Augusta
Bruce, who had been like a daughter to the dead Princess, resident
bedchamber woman to the Queen.
Frogmore had been much frequented by Queen Charlotte and her
daughters, and was the place where they held many of their family
festivals. It had been the country house of Princess Augusta for more
than twenty years. On her death it was given to the Duchess of Kent.
It is an unpretending white country house, spacious enough, and with
all the taste of the day when it was built expended on the grounds,
which does not prevent them from lying very low, with the inevitable
sheet of water almost beneath the windows. Yet it is a lovely, bowery,
dwelling when spring buds are bursting and the birds are filling the
air with music; such a sheltered, peaceful, home-like house as an
ageing woman well might crave. On it still lingers, in spite of a
period when it passed into younger hands, the stamp of the old
Duchess, with her simple state, her unaffected dignity, her
affectionate interest in her numerous kindred. The place is but a
bowshot from the old grey castle of Windsor. It was a chosen resort of
the royal children, to whom the noble, kind, grandame was all that
gracious age can be. Here the Queen brought the most distinguished of
her guests to present them to her mother, who had known so many of the
great men of her time. Here the royal daughter herself came often,
leaving behind her the toils of government and the ceremonies of rank,
where she could always be at ease, was always more than welcome. Here
she comes still, after twenty years, to view old scenes--the chair by
which she sat when the Duchess of Kent occupied it, the piano she knew
so well, the familiar portraits, the old-fashioned furniture, suiting
the house admirably, the drooping trees on the lawn, under which the
Queen would breakfast in fine weather, according to an old Kensington
--an old German--custom.
The long verandah was wont to contain vases of flowers and statues of
the Duchess's grandchildren, and formed a pleasant promenade for an
old lady. Within the smaller, cosier rooms, with the softly tinted
pink walls covered with portraits, was led the daily life which as it
advanced in infirmity necessarily narrowed in compass, while the State
rooms remained for family and Court gatherings. The last use made of
the great drawing-room by its venerable mistress was after her death,
when she lay in state there.
Half-length portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Kent are in the place
usually occupied by the likenesses of the master and mistress of the
house. Among the other pictures are full-length portraits of the Queen
and Prince Albert in their youth, taken soon after their marriage--
like the natural good end to the various pictures of her Majesty in
her fair English childhood and maidenhood, with the blonde hair
clustering about the open innocent forehead, the fearless blue eyes,
the frank mouth. The child, long a widow in her turn, a mother,
grandmother, great-grandmother, must look with strange mingled
feelings on these shadows of her early, unconscious self.
There are innumerable likenesses of the Queen's children such as a
loving grandmother would delight to accumulate, from the baby Princess
Royal with the good dog Eos curled round by her side, the child's tiny
foot on the hound's nose, to the same Princess a blooming girl-bride
by the side of her bridegroom, Prince Frederick William of Prussia.
The Duchess's other children and grandchildren are here on canvas,
with many portraits of her brothers and sisters and their children. A
full-length likeness of the former owner of Frogmore, Princess
Augusta, Fanny Burney's beloved princess, hangs above a chimneypiece;
while on the walls of another room quaintly painted floral festoons,
the joint work of the painter, Mary Moser, and the artistic Princess
Elizabeth, are still preserved.
Frogmore was for some years the residence of Princess Christian of
Schleswig-Holstein. When she removed to Cumberland House, the
furniture which had belonged to the Duchess of Kent was brought back,
and the place restored as much as possible to the condition in which
she had left it, which implies the presence of many cherished relics--
such as the timepiece which was the last gift of the Queen and the
Prince, and a picture said to have been painted by both representing
Italian peasants praying beside a roadside calvary. There are numerous
tokens of womanly tastes in the gay, bright fashion of the Duchess's
time, among them a gorgeously tinted inlaid table from the first
Exhibition, and elaborate specimens of Berlin woolwork, offerings from
friends of the mistress of the house and from the ladies of her suite.
In one of the simply furnished bedrooms of quiet little Frogmore, as
it chanced, the heir of the Prince of Wales first saw the light. For
here was born unexpectedly, making a great stir in the little
household, Prince Victor Albert of Wales.