Prince Albert died on 14 December 1861 at Windsor Castle, with the official cause recorded at the time as typhoid fever, but modern historians now think an underlying chronic bowel illness and infection were likely involved.

Quick Scoop

  • Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) died at age 42 in the Blue Room at Windsor Castle on the night of 14 December 1861.
  • His doctors diagnosed and officially reported typhoid fever as the cause of death, a serious infectious disease often linked to poor sanitation in the 19th century.
  • Later medical historians, looking back at his long history of abdominal pain, fatigue and recurrent illness, have suggested he may have had a chronic intestinal disease (such as something like Crohn’s disease) that flared up, probably led to bowel perforation, sepsis and then pneumonia, which finished the process.
  • No autopsy was allowed, so the exact medical cause can’t be definitively proved, which is why discussion of “how did Prince Albert die” often includes both the official typhoid diagnosis and these modern reinterpretations.

What happened in his final illness?

  • In late 1861, Albert’s health, already fragile for years, deteriorated with fever, weakness and gastric symptoms; he had been overworked and under heavy emotional and political stress, which likely worsened his condition.
  • He took to his bed at Windsor, where his temperature, breathing, and exhaustion worsened over several weeks despite doctors’ care, before he died with Victoria and several of their children present.

Why do people still ask “how did Prince Albert die”?

  • For decades, history books simply repeated that he died of typhoid, but surviving medical descriptions do not fit typhoid perfectly and there were doubts even at the time.
  • Modern analyses of his lifelong symptoms point toward a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that may have caused a perforated intestine and blood poisoning, with pneumonia in the last days; this reinterpretation fuels ongoing articles, videos and forum discussions that revisit how did Prince Albert die as a kind of historical medical mystery.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.