What Edward Longshanks, Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin had in common
PAUL JOHNSON
Counselling, in its many forms, has spread rapidly in recent years and evokes scathing criticism, especially when the police, who can't be bothered to investigate burglaries nowadays, offer the distressed counselling instead. One area where this new form of therapy works well, however, is bereavement. There are many people who simply cannot get over the death of someone close to them — a parent, a sister or brother, a child. They grieve and brood, perhaps for the rest of their lives; their sorrow makes them ill, impotent, useless. A well-trained and gifted bereavement counsellor can often effect a cure (if that is the word) in weeks, and allow the patient to resume a normal life.
An outstanding case of a person who would have benefited from this form of counselling was Queen Victoria. Her distress at the death of Albert was extreme, unnatural and permanent. It was not just the rituals that kept it festering — she went to bed with his nightshirt clutched in her arms and had his clothes freshly laid out every day while she lived — but her conviction that he was faultless, though the evidence shows that they often quarrelled while he was alive and that she thought he was wrong on many points. Once he was dead, she believed him as infallible as any pope, and this made it impossible for her to carry out her public or even private duties without his support. Her refusal to do her job might have wrecked the monarchy and it made things difficult for her prime ministers. (I am surprised that there is no authoritative article in a learned journal on the practical damage caused by Victoria's bereavement neurosis.) One of the ways in which a counsellor removes the neurosis is by discussing with the patient the character and behaviour of the dead one and eliciting the admission that he/she was far from perfect. If Victoria had been coaxed into describing their rows, and why she hurled at the poor man heavy pieces of ormolu-mounted malachite desk-fittings (her usual missiles), she might soon have been put to rights again, and there would have been none of the trouble with John Brown, the Munshi, etc. Indeed she might even have remarried: she was only 42 when Albert died, albeit a mother of nine.
Another suitable case for treatment was Charles Darwin. who never really recovered from the death of his favourite daughter, Annie, aged nine. He could not bring himself to attend the child's funeral or to visit her grave for 12 years; indeed he avoided the whole district. A memoir he wrote of her a week after her death stressed her perfection, physically, intellectually and morally. Her movements were 'elastic and full of vigour', her mind 'pure and transparent', her conduct 'generous, handsome and unsuspicious. . . free from envy and jealousy, good-tempered and never passionate'. She never needed to be punished 'in any way whatsoever'. 'Every expression in her countenance beamed with affection and kindness, and all her habits were influenced by her loving disposition.' And so on. Poor Darwin, so scientific in everything that did not involve his emotions, so blind in those things that did! How would a counsellor set about encouraging the desolate Darwin to correct this image of the perfect child, and demote her from the paragonpedestal from which, so long as she remained there, she dominated and embittered his life?
The curse of death, in this case, was important because it cost Darwin his Christianity. It is a common misconception that the great man ceased to believe in God as a result of his researches into the origin of species, and especially ours. In fact, his professional work had nothing to do with his religious beliefs, or lack of them. He himself said that science and faith were quite separate and not necessarily connected at all. He deplored, as all sensible men and women do, the fallacy that science was the enemy of religion — he thought the opposite, if anything. But he could not see the justice or reason for Annies death, and rather than rage at an unjust and unreasonable God, he preferred to shrivel up his belief in God at all. Unfortunately, his extreme followers, especially the Darwinian fundamentalists who dominate so much of official science today, have insisted on this Manichaean polarity, and thus created bottomless oceans of unhappiness in the psyche of educated humanity. If counselling had succeeded with Darwin, he might have kept his religious belief, and the modern cult of his 'message' would have been entirely different and much more healthy.
One point that bereavement experts make is that the loss-neurosis can be cured by transposing grief on to physical monuments to the dead, unloading it on to marble and stone. I thought of this the other day while visiting Kensal Green cemetery and marvelling at the immense structures, often rendered beautiful by time and decay, which the Victorians erected over the dust of their dead. However, no one played the monumental card more often than Victoria, and it never did any good. She put up a stone to mark the place where Albert shot his last stag at Balmoral; another to mark his last battue' at Windsor. There was a sacred pyramid to commemorate him at Craig Lowrigan and a grotesque affair in Perth, which has him wearing a bronze kilt. All this in addition to the public erections in Kensington and in all the chief cities, and the colossal statue in the Horticultural Garden. These artefacts merely inflamed her grief because, she said, they did not do her hero justice: the shoulders of the colossus were 'not quite right', the neck 'too thin', and his chest in the Albert Memorial was 'too hollow', the only merit being, 'It can be seen from a great distance.'
A case where monumentalising expunged grief-neurosis was that of Edward I. His love for his wife. Eleanor of Castile, was fierce, like everything about Longshanks. He married her when she was 12 and immediately set about procreation. She bore him 15 children, accompanied him on a crusade and whenever he was campaigning, in Wales, Gascony, etc. (Edward would build a special stage from which his womenfolk could safely watch him bombard a castle he was besieging, especially if he had a new assault-engine to display). Worn out, I suppose, she died aged 49, and the king's grief was — well, monumental. He built the most complex and expensive series of monuments ever devised for an English monarch. She had three separate tombs, at Lincoln for the entrails, at Blackfriars for the heart and in Westminster for the rest, surmounted by a magnificent gilt bronze effig, which is one of the finest things in the Abbey. She died at Harby in Nottinghamshire, and at each stopping-place in the funeral cortege on its way to the capital, 12 in all, Edward erected a magnificent cross, the work of two masons of genius, John of Battle and Richard of Crundale. Those 'Eleanor crosses' that survive are among the masterpieces of English mediaeval art.
That is a reminder that commemorating the dead has been a prime occasion for artistic creation throughout history, as well as a way of exteriorising and subduing grief. Most people now end up in pitiful mass-produced urns or under gruesome slabs of machine-polished marble. Old Jowett once remarked, 'There is no place which displays more sincere sentiments and worse taste than a cemetery.' Things have not improved since his day; fallen catastrophically, rather. I heard this week of an organisation seeking to improve matters: Memorials by Artists, which runs a national service from Snape in Suffolk and can be reached on 01728 688934 or by emailing harriet@memotialsbyartists.co.uk
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