Death
Just as plans for both his marriage to Mary and his appointment as Viceroy of Ireland were under discussion, Albert Victor fell ill with influenza in the great influenza pandemic of 1889–92. He developed pneumonia and died at Sandringham House in Norfolk on 14 January 1892, less than a week after his 28th birthday. The Prince and Princess of Wales, Princesses Maud and Victoria, Prince George, Princess Mary, the Duke and Duchess of Teck, three doctors (Manby, Laking and Broadbent) and three nurses were present. The Prince of Wales's chaplain, Canon Frederick Hervey, stood over Albert Victor reading prayers for the dying.
The nation was shocked. Shops put up their shutters. The Prince of Wales wrote to Queen Victoria, "Gladly would I have given my life for his". Princess Mary wrote to Queen Victoria of the Princess of Wales, "the despairing look on her face was the most heart-rending thing I have ever seen." His younger brother Prince George wrote, "how deeply I did love him; & I remember with pain nearly every hard word & little quarrel I ever had with him & I long to ask his forgiveness, but, alas, it is too late now!" George took Albert Victor's place in the line of succession, eventually succeeding to the throne as King George V in 1910. Drawn together during their shared period of mourning, Prince George later married Mary himself in 1893. She became Queen on George's accession.
Conspiracy theories surrounding Albert Victor's death—that he died of syphilis or poison, that he was pushed off a cliff on the instructions of Lord Randolph Churchill or that his death was faked to remove him from the line of succession—are fabrications.
Albert Victor's mother, Alexandra, never fully recovered from her son's death and kept the room in which he died as a shrine. At the funeral, Mary laid her bridal wreath of orange blossom upon the coffin. James Kenneth Stephen, Albert Victor's former tutor, refused all food from the day of Albert Victor's death and died 20 days later; he had suffered a head injury in 1886 which left him suffering from psychosis. The Prince is buried in the Albert Memorial Chapel close to St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. His tomb, by Alfred Gilbert, is "the finest single example of late 19th-century sculpture in the British Isles". A recumbent effigy of the Prince in a Hussar uniform (almost impossible to see properly in situ) lies above the tomb. Kneeling over him is an angel, holding a heavenly crown. The tomb is surrounded by an elaborate railing, with figures of saints. The perfectionist Gilbert spent too much on the commission, went bankrupt, and left the country. Five of the smaller figures were only completed with "a greater roughness and pittedness of texture" after his return to Britain in the 1920s.
Read more about this topic: Prince Albert Victor, Duke Of Clarence And Avondale
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