Among them were the repeated strokes of personal misfortune which befell the Queen during a cruelly short space of years.

In 1878 the Princess Alice, who had married in 1862 the Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, died in tragic circumstances.

In the following year the Prince Imperial, the only son of the Empress Eugenie, to whom Victoria, since the catastrophe of 1870, had become devotedly attached, was killed in the Zulu War.

Two years later, in 1881, the Queen lost Lord Beaconsfield, and, in 1883, John Brown.

In 1884 the Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, who had been an invalid from birth, died prematurely, shortly after his marriage.