When news of the death of ex-Emperor Napoleon on the island of St Helena reached Britain in July 1821, a servant was tasked with communicating the tidings to King George IV, then in residence at Windsor Castle. He went into the royal presence, bowed, and said ‘Sire, your greatest enemy.
The jury took only a few seconds to confer, not even bothering to leave the packed Court of Common Pleas in London where they had been sitting all day. Then the foreman said to the judge: My lord, we are agreed in a verdict it is for the Defendant. This was the cue for loud bursts of applause and shouts of Good old Melbourne .
No less a person than the Prime Minister, the handsome Lord Melbourne, had been dramatically cleared of having criminal intercourse with a married woman, the alluring Caroline Norton.
Her aggrieved husband, George, had made the accusation in June 1836. London society buzzed with excitement, predictions, lamentations, exultations or a combination of all these emotions.
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Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!”
With these words, Queen Victoria described her wedding day in her diary – 10 February 1840, writing up the event for the day’s entry from Windsor Castle. It marked the beginning of her marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The opposite date of this ecstatic exhortation of joy on behalf of the Queen was unquestionably 14 December 1861; the day of the death of the Prince Consort at Windsor Castle, after which there was a hiatus of two weeks, before the grief-stricken Queen could even bring herself to record the event of the previous fortnight in a journal entry. Twenty-one years had preceded this date, during which the Queen had given birth to nine children, five daughters and four sons.