After Albert died, aged 42, Victoria was inconsolable and retired from public duties and appearances, refusing to open Parliament. But she did manage to continue to dictate where her attendants were to sit in their own dining room-she dined alone after Albert's death. It is doubtful that she ever saw where they ate but she did decree what they ate. Hubbard gives us all the details-including menus of the meals served and a description of a brass table with steam-filled legs to keep the food warm. Governesses had to eat alone in their rooms; doctors were a special problem as they did not fit into the established hierarchy. She fretted about foods, suggesting that soup be added to her servants' menus to vary the diet, and meddled in the hiring of a new confectionary cook: Victoria was very fond of sweets. She dictated the type and number of biscuits allowed on a plate.
Death and its associated rituals were another of Victoria's favoured pastimes. Hubbard describes the explicit and detailed orders the Queen sent outlining mourning clothes to be worn and when: my favourites are the "crepe weepers", long fabric streamers worn by women attached to the hair and hung down the back, and the black swords and buckles specified by Victoria for men. She commemorated the anniversaries of deaths of her family members as well as her ladies-in-waiting and her private secretaries. She spent an inordinate amount of time choosing gifts: every visitor received a gift, as did all of the hundreds of courtiers and servants, usually tiny portraits of the Queen or, bizarrely, locks of hair. Some got stags' teeth set with "green enamel leaves to look like acorns", mementoes of Balmoral no doubt. Hubbard guesses that Indian servants and drunken footmen wondered at these rather odd gifts.
Hubbard gives us many of these delicious anecdotes about what can only be considered the eccentricities of a queen who spawned many of the royal families of Europe, and spent a good part of her life mourning her beloved husband. She had her own sense of duty but very different from duty as it is understood by a modern monarch, whose survival depends heavily on being out and about, and on understanding the needs of her subjects. Victoria would spend a significant portion of her 60-plus years on the throne remote from her subjects; Elizabeth II has spent her 60-plus years on the throne in intimate contact with the British people during her famous walkabouts. Both had one thing in common: they captured the fascination of the American people, not least of all this reviewer of this fascinating book.
