Bloom thinks of Queen Victoria's ostentatious mourning for
her prematurely deceased husband, Albert, and of the
ostentatious mourning that she prescribed for her own passing,
as a tad overdone: "Drawn on a guncarriage. Victoria and
Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning." On 2 February
1901 the Queen's coffin, bearing her body dressed in a white
dress and her wedding veil, was indeed drawn on a gun
carriage, in an immense procession of soldiers, sailors, and
leaders bedecked in military regalia, serenaded by the booming
of naval guns. Two days later, the coffin was placed in a huge
sarcophagus in the richly appointed Frogmore mausoleum that
she had ordered to house herself and her beloved husband in
death.
Rather than be buried in Westminster Abbey, Victoria and
Albert desired a mausoleum of their own, and had long planned
to build one. When Albert unexpectedly died in 1861, work had
already begun on a mausoleum for the queen's mother on the
grounds of the Frogmore Estate that adjoins Windsor Castle, in
Berkshire. (The park is so called because many frogs live in
the surrounding marshes.) Albert's death accelerated plans for
a royal resting place. The building was finished in a year,
and the interior decorations, which are opulent and ornate,
were completed over the next decade. At the center of all the
show, Victoria's coffin lies beside Albert's in a 30-ton
sarcophagus carved from a single block of flawless, polished
Aberdeen granite. Marble effigies of the Queen and her Prince
Consort adorn the top of the sarcophagus.
Bloom's comment on Victoria's decision, late in her life, to
moderate slightly her extravagant personal mourning for
Albert—"But in the end she put a few violets in her
bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts"—seems to imply
also a criticism of her very public funerary arrangements.
Dead bodies do not require such attention.