Victoria - 1897 - Diamond Jubilee
In September 1896 the queen's reign had reached a point at which it exceeded in length that of any other English sovereign; but by her special request all public celebrations of the fact were deferred until the following June 1897 which marked the completion of sixty years from her accession. As the lime drew on it was obvious that the celebrations of this Diamond Jubilee, as it was popularly called, would exceed in magnificence those of the Jubilee of 1887.
Mr Chamberlain, the secretary for the colonies, induced his colleagues to seize the opportunity of making the jubilee a festival of the British empire. Accordingly, the prime ministers of all the self-governing colonies, with their families, were invited to come to London as the guests of the country to take part in the Jubilee procession; and drafts of the troops from every British colony and dependency were brought home for the same purpose. The procession was, in the strictest sense of the term, unique. Here was a display, not only of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, but of Mounted Rifles from Victoria and New South Wales, from the Cape and from Natal, and from the Dominion of Canada. Here were Hausas from the Niger and the Gold Coast, colored men from the West India regiments, zaplichs from Cyprus, Chinamen from Hong Kong, and Dyaks — now civilized into military police—from British North Borneo. Here, most brilliant sight of all, were the Imperial Service troops sent by the native princes of India; while the detachments of Sikhs who marched earlier in the procession received full admiration and applause.
Altogether the queen was in her carriage for more than four hours, in itself an extraordinary physical feat for a woman of seventy-eight. Her own feelings were shown by the simple but significant message she sent to her people throughout the world: "From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them." The illuminations in London and the great provincial towns were magnified; and all the hills from Ben Nevis to the South Downs were crowned with bonfires. The queen herself held a great review at Aldershot; but a much more significant display was the review by the prince of Wales of the fleet at Spithead on Saturday, 16 June. No less than 165 vessels of all classes were drawn up in four lines, extending altogether to a length of 30 miles.
The two years that followed the Diamond Jubilee were, as regards the queen, comparatively uneventful. Her health remained good, and her visit to Cimiez in the spring of 1898 was as enjoyable and as beneficial as before. In May 1900, after another visit to the Riviera, the queen performed what proved to be her last ceremonial function in London: she proceeded in "semi-state" to South Kensington, and laid the foundation stone of the new buildings completing the Museum —henceforth to be called the Victoria and Albert Museum — which had been planned more than forty years before by the prince consort.
Griefs and anxieties encompassed the queen during the last year of her life. But if the South African War proved more serious than had been anticipated, it did more to weld the empire together than years of peaceful progress might have accomplished. The queen's frequent messages of thanks and greeting to her colonies and to the troops sent by them, and her reception of the latter at Windsor, gave evidence of the heartfelt joy with which she saw the sons of the empire giving their lives for the defense of its integrity; and the satisfaction which she showed in the Federation of the Australian colonies was no less keen.
The reverses of the first part of the Boer campaign, together with the loss of so many of her officers and soldiers, caused no small part of that "great strain" of which the Court Circular spoke in the ominous words which first told the country that she was seriously ill. But the queen faced the new situation with her usual courage, devotion and strength of will. She reviewed the departing regiments; she entertained the wives and children of the Windsor soldiers who had gone to the war; she showed by frequent messages her watchful interest in the course of the campaign and in the efforts which were being made throughout the whole empire; and her Christmas gift of a box of chocolate to every soldier in South Africa was a touching proof of her sympathy and interest.
She relinquished her annual holiday on the Riviera, feeling that at such a time she ought not to leave her country. Entirely on her own initiative, and moved by admiration for the fine achievements of "her brave Irish" during the war, the queen announced her intention of paying a long visit to Dublin, and there, accordingly, she went for the month of April 1900, staying in the Viceregal Lodge, receiving many of the leaden of Irish society, inspecting some 50,000 school children from all parts of Ireland, and taking many a drive amid the churning scenery of the neighborhood of Dublin. She went even further than this attempt to conciliate Irish feeling, and to show her recognition of the gallantry of the Irish soldiers she Issued an order for them to wear the shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, and for a new regiment of Irish Guards to be constituted.
In the previous November the queen had had the pleasure of receiving, on a private visit, her grandson, the German Emperor, who came accompanied by the empress and by two of their sons. This visit cheered the queen, and the successes of the army which followed the arrival of Lord Roberts in Africa occasioned great joy to her, as she testified by many published messages. But independently of the public anxieties of the war, and of those aroused by the violent and unexpected outbreak of fanaticism in China, the year brought deep private griefs to the queen. In 1890 her grandson, the hereditary prince of Coburg, had succumbed to phthisis, and in 1900 his father, the duke of Coburg, the queen's second son, previously known as the duke of Edinburgh, also died (July 30). Then Prince Christian Victor, the queen's grandson, fell a victim to enteric fever at Pretoria; and during the autumn it came to be known that the empress Frederick, the queen's eldest daughter, was very seriously ill. Moreover, just at the end of the year a loss which greatly shocked and grieved the queen was experienced in the sudden death, at Windsor Castle, of the Dowager Lady Churchill, one of her oldest and most intimate friends.
These losses told upon the queen at her advanced age. Throughout her life she bad enjoyed excellent health, and even in the last few years the only marks of age were rheumatic stiffness of the joints, which prevented walking, and a diminished power of eyesight. The antecedents of Queen Victoria's late-life depression, including multiple losses, disabilities, and chronic pain, taken together with the presentation of vegetative, affective, and late cognitive symptoms, suggest the presence of a distinctively geriatric major depressive disorder. Although historians and biographers have long been aware of Queen Victoria's final depression, the emphasis has mostly been on her earlier and prolonged mourning for her husband Prince Albert. Re-examined now, the Queen's Journal suggests that a severe late-life depressive episode occurring approximately in her last 5 months contributed meaningfully to her death.
In the autumn of 1900 her health began definitely to fail, and though arrangements were made for another holiday in the South, it was plain that her strength was seriously affected. Still she continued the ordinary routine of her duties and occupations. Before Christmas she made her usual journey to Osborne, and there on 02 January she received Lord Roberts on his return from South Africa and handed to him the insignia of the Garter. A fortnight later she commanded a second visit from the field marshal; she continued to transact business, and until a week before her death she still took her daily drive. A sudden loss of power then supervened, and on Friday evening, 18 January, the Court Circular published an authoritative announcement of her illness. On Tuesday, 22 January 1901, she died.
She was mourned at her death not by her own country only, nor even by all English-speaking people, but by the world. The funeral in London on 01 and 02 February, including first the passage of the coffin from the Isle of Wight to Gosport between lines of warships, and secondly a procession from London to Windsor, was a memorable solemnity: the greatest of English sovereigns, whose name stood in history to mark an age, had gone to her rest.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Her Majesty's funeral was the absence of most of the conventional trappings of woe. For forty years the Queen had not once been seen out of mourning. Black all the time had been her only wear; in every photograph of her, and on every occasion of her presence, always the same. But she put off her mourning, and came robed, as it were, from head to foot, as she lay in a blaze of color - purple and scarlet and crimson and white and gold - far off her coming shone, and her pall, in the universal blackness of the crowd, glittered like a diamond, catching and giving back in a very riot of colors the faint sunshine. At last, after forty years of widowhood, the Queen was out of mourning.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
