The Crown of Sacrifice

While a crescendo of bereavements later in life undoubtedly turned Victoria into a gloomy and retrospective person and sovereign, this chapter suggests that they also bolstered her spiritual credentials with her people. The chapter concentrates on the lavish way in which she buried and commemorated a series of male relatives—her son Leopold, the Duke of Albany; her grandsons Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Christian Victor; and her son-in-law Henry of Battenberg—suggesting that this made her the Empire’s mourner in chief. The martial flourishes of their funerals aligned a feminine monarchy with the increasingly militaristic and imperial character of male elite culture. Changes in Christian eschatology meant that concern with death in late Victorian culture focused on the feelings of the living rather than the postmortem fate of the dead, and as such there was much discussion of and identification with Victoria’s feelings. In this way, royal deaths secured Victoria’s position as the head of what historians have termed an ‘empire of sentiment’, whose Christian advocates claimed it was based on sacrifice rather than power.