Suspended, not Destroyed

Abstract

On the night of 14 March 1861 the Queen watched Dion Boucicault’s sensation melodrama The Colleen Bawn for the third time at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand. The forty-two-year-old Victoria could not have known this would be her last visit to a public theatre. The next day she travelled to Frogmore House at Windsor, where the Duchess of Kent lay dying. ‘The dreaded terrible calamity has befallen us,’ she wrote on the day her seventy-four-year-old mother died; ‘oh God! how awful.’¹ Retreating into a mournful solitude, the Queen could not endure the sound of her own dear children’s voices, let alone the chatter of courtiers and servants. She endured yet greater suffering six months later when, on the evening of 14 December, Prince Albert died in the Blue Room at Windsor Castle. Forever after she denied herself the public amusements that she and her husband had enjoyed for twenty years, committing herself instead to playing the role of the reclusive, grieving widow for the remaining forty years of her life. As she later acknowledged to her Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, ‘going to Theatres & living in Town’ had become impossible for her after ‘’61’.²