When Prince Albert breathed his last at 10.50pm on the night of Saturday 14 December 1861 at Windsor, a telegraph message was sent within the hour to the lord mayor that the great bell of St Paul’s Cathedral should toll out the news across London. Everyone knew that this sound signified one of two things: the death of a monarch or a moment of extreme national crisis such as war.


People living in the vicinity of the cathedral who had already gone to their beds that night were woken by the doleful sound; many of them dressed and began gathering outside St Paul’s to share the news with shock and incredulity. Only the previous morning the latest bulletin from Windsor had informed them that the prince, who had been unwell for the last two weeks, had rallied during the night of the 13th. The whole nation had settled down for the evening reassured, hopeful that the worst was now over.

Most of the Sunday morning papers for the 15th had already gone to press and did not carry the news, although in London one or two special broadsheets were rushed out and sold at a premium. For most ordinary British people the news of Prince Albert’s death came with the mournful sound of bells, as the message was relayed from village to village and city to city across the country’s churches.

Many still did not realise the significance until, when it came to the prayers for the royal family during morning service, the prince’s name was omitted. But it was still hard to believe. The official bulletins from Windsor had suggested only a ‘low fever’ – which in Victorian parlance could be anything from a chill to something more sinister like typhoid fever. The royal doctors had been extremely circumspect in saying what exactly was wrong, not just to the public but also Albert’s highly strung wife, and very few had any inkling of how ill he was. How could this have happened, people asked themselves; how could a vigorous man of only 42 have died without warning?

The impact of Prince Albert’s death, coming as unexpectedly as it did, was dramatic and unprecedented. The last time the nation had mourned the loss of a member of the royal family in similar circumstances had been back in 1817 when Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent – and heir to the throne failing the birth of any legitimate male heirs – had died shortly after giving birth to a still-born baby boy. Public grief at this tragedy had been enormous, and it was no less with the death of Albert.

His might not have been a young and beautiful death like Charlotte’s but its impact, both publicly and politically, was enormous. It was seen as nothing less than a national calamity, for Britain had in effect lost its king. And worse, Albert’s death had come at a time of political crisis, with the British government embroiled in a tense diplomatic standoff with the Northern states during the American Civil War. This had prompted Prince Albert’s final act of public business on 1 December. Already very sick, he had amended a belligerent despatch from Lord Palmerston following the North’s seizure of two Confederate agents from a British West Indies mail packet, the Trent. The agents were on their way to Europe to raise support for the South.

At worst, the boarding of the Trent was a breach of British neutrality. Yet, Albert had warned that to force the issue without finding a diplomatic way out would mean war – at a time when Britain had barely recovered from the disastrous campaign in the Crimea.

His intercession had helped defuse a tense political situation, a fact that prompted Prime Minister Palmerston to observe that such had become the prince’s value to the British government that it would have been “Better for England to have had a ten years’ war with America than to have lost Prince Albert”. Yet Britain had indeed lost Albert, and the prince’s death plunged the queen into grief so profound that it would dramatically alter the shape of the British monarchy, not just for the rest of Victoria’s reign but in the way in which it has come down to us today.


The public response in the days immediately afterwards bears many parallels with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of Princess Diana more than a century later. And, in a sombre precursor of princes William and Harry following Diana’s coffin in 1997, the loss was made equally poignant by the presence at Albert’s all-male funeral at Windsor of two of his young sons, Bertie (20) and Arthur (11).