The VV's latest Victorian novel, The Goddess and the Thief, is a Gothic Oriental: a story in which Queen Victoria plays a small but significant role, during which she consults with mediums while hoping to make some contact with the soul of the man whose Christmas death would haunt her life forever more – when Prince Albert died on December 14th in the year of 1861.
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The novel is a fiction, but some scenes are based on truths. The Queen’s Prime Minister, Gladstone, was himself a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. Many eminent men of the time were convinced that, just as science had found a way to harness electricity, other invisible energies might soon be discovered and utilised - even the existence of a parallel spirit world.
Before Prince Albert’s sudden end the royal family would spend their Christmases at Windsor, with candles lit on the festive trees that Albert himself made fashionable, when he brought that tradition from Germany. But, following his passing the Queen preferred to spend her future Christmases at Osborne House.
It was there, on the Isle of Wight, that the couple enjoyed many happy times. It was also there, while Albert lived, that they met with spiritualist mediums. One of those psychics impressed the Queen so much that she received the gift of a golden watch, upon the back of which had been engraved the words: “Presented by Her Majesty to Miss Georgiana Eagle for her Meritorious and Extraordinary Clairvoyance Produced at Osborn House, Isle of Wight, July 17, 1846.”
Perhaps Miss Georgina Eagle was also there when a table began to levitate and Albert was so horrified that he ordered the object be destroyed, and then demanded that they never dabble in such things again. But, he was also recorded as having told his wife: "We don't know in what state we shall meet again, but that we shall recognize each other and be together in eternity I am perfectly certain."
The Queen couldn’t wait for Eternity, though we’ll probably never know for sure how many spirit mediums were smuggled into her private rooms following her husband’s death, or whether his ghost was ever raised around the time of his Christmas death – as it seems he may have been in the plot of The Goddess and the Thief. However, there are verified accounts of meetings with a Mr Robert Lees – the first when Lees was just 13, when he wrote a letter to the Queen with reference to intimate details that no-one but she could have ever known. Victoria later invited him to join the royal household as resident spirit medium. However Lees was to decline, suggesting that another man would be better suited to fill that role.
That man was John Brown, the low-born Scottish gamekeeper who became Victoria’s confidante. He was also the spirit medium through which her husband often ‘spoke’ – so often that in later years the Queen expressed a strong desire to publish the diaries in which she wrote accounts of all those séances. However, her advisors were appalled at such a notion, no doubt relieved when, after her death, her diaries were heavily edited when re-transcribed by Princess Beatrice, her literary executor.
And as to the diaries of John Brown – every word was destroyed upon his death. What secrets might those words reveal if only we could read them now?