Last Days of Glory: The Death of Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 shook Britain to its core, and reverberated not just throughout the Commonwealth, but around the world. She was a woman in her eighties, and yet it seems no one could contemplate the end of a reign that had lasted so long. Most could not remember a time when she was not Queen, and the very stability of everyday life seemed to depend on her regency. The anxiety of the government and the royal family about the prospect of the Queen's death was such that the news of her illness was deliberately concealed from the public for more than a week. When it came, people from England to Jamaica wept in the streets, and this grief was surpassed only by fear for the future. "God help us" was the standard reaction from all strata of society.

Last Days of Glory is the definitive account of those last 23 days in January 1901, when Victoria traveled to Osborne House to die. The momentous reaction to the Queen's passing attached to it more significance and a greater sense of change than the turn of the century had carried just a year earlier. Through the prism of those last days Tony Rennell presents us with a series of resonant and absorbing snapshots of a fading Empire at the end of the Victorian Age, and captures a nation coping with change, balancing comfortable nostalgia with the arrival of a new order.

The most striking point in this book is the fact that no-one seemed prepared for Queen Victoria's death, which is amazing considering the woman was in her eighties! But it also entertainingly covers the small facts - the internal squabbles within the large and extended royal family; the fact the Queen was a bit of a glutton until her final illness; the boy who flicked a match and set fire to a man's hat while the public watched the funeral procession move through London. Rennell manages to steer a course between the academic and the `dumbing down' sometimes prevalent in modern day `popular history'. Rather, he just sticks to the facts and supposes his readers are intelligent enough to understand and interpret them.

Add to this story a lost effigy for the burial sarcophagus and over 100 daily newspapers scrapping for every little tidbit of information, and you have a saga most fiction writers could only dream about. To make the story even more interesting, we learn about the changes in the Empire and the world during the course of Victoria's reign. Telegrams have revolutionized communication, telephones are in their infancy, and no one really believes that the new horseless carraiges will become popular because they're too expensive. Queen Victoria's death takes place at the dawn of a new millennium, so the end of the 19th Century and the end of the Victorian Era occur together. Also, the British Empire will never again be as great or as grand as it was during Victoria's reign. It all makes for fascinating reading.

The only flaw I could find in The Last Dayas of Glory involved a historical fact. The Russian Tsar and Tsarina, Nicholas and Alexandra (Victoria's favorite granddaughter) got married after Nicholas became tsar and not before. But other than this minor error, I find no fault here. Tony Rennell's book is a nice surprise and well worth reading.

Beginning a few days before the Queen's death, Rennell proceeds slowly through her final illness, providing enough background to satisfy us without boring us. After the Queen passes, he gives us ample reaction to the death, even printing (rather pompous by today's standards) poems and songs written at the time (interesting to compare them with the songs written after September 11). He brings us through the funeral and burial at Windsor.

Rennell tells us what was not widely known before--that Victoria was buried holding a picture of John Brown and a locket with his hair, and wearing a ring he had given her. He is careful to put this in the proper context, devoting an appendix to setting forth his view that Brown and the Queen had an entirely proper, though unconventional, relationship.

Rennell puts the event in historical perspective--the conflict between those who wanted a "proper" amount of mourning, and those who wanted to move on quickly, reopen the theaters, put off mourning dress. I wonder how long it has been since the general public wore mourning for a monarch, and if there will be any expectation that it be done next time. Yet in 1901, the period of public mourning was shortened to "only" six weeks!

This book was published before 9/11, but I wonder, if, in 2101, a similar book will be published to remind the public of our watershed event.

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