CHAPTER XVI. THE CONDEMNATION OF THE ENGLISH DUEL.—ANOTHER MARRIAGE.—THE QUEEN'S VISIT TO CHATEAU D'EU.
On the 1st of July, 1843, duelling received its death-blow in England by a fatal duel—so unnatural and so painful in its consequences that it served the purpose of calling public attention to the offence—long tolerated, even advocated in some quarters, and to the theory of military honour on which this particular duel took place. Two officers, Colonel Fawcett and Lieutenant Munro, who were also brothers-in-law, had a quarrel. Colonel Fawcett was elderly, had been in India, was out of health and exceedingly irritable in temper. It came out afterwards that he had given his relation the greatest provocation. Still Lieutenant Munro hung back from what up to that time had been regarded as the sole resource of a gentleman, especially a military man, in the circumstances. He showed great reluctance to challenge Colonel Fawcett, and it was only after the impression—mistaken or otherwise—was given to the insulted man that his regiment expected him to take the old course, and if he did not do so he must be disgraced throughout the service, that he called out his brother-in-law.
The challenge was accepted, the meeting took place, Colonel Fawcett was shot dead, and the horrible anomaly presented itself of two sisters—the one rendered a widow by the hand of her brother-in-law, and a family of children clad in mourning for their uncle, whom their father had slain. Apart from the bloodshed, Lieutenant Munro was ruined by the miserable step on which he had been thrust. Public feeling was roused to protest against the barbarous practice by which a bully had it in his power to risk the life of a man immeasurably his superior, against whom he happened to have conceived a dislike. Prince Albert interested himself deeply in the question, especially as it concerned the army. Various expedients were suggested; eventually an amendment was inserted into the Articles of War which was founded on the more reasonable, humane, and Christian conclusion, that to offer an apology, or even to make reparation where wrong had been committed, was more becoming the character of an officer and a gentleman, than to furnish the alternative of standing up to kill or to be killed for a hasty word or a rash act.
On the 28th of July, Princess Augusta of Cambridge was married in the chapel at Buckingham Palace to the hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Princess Augusta was the elder of the two daughters of the Duke of Cambridge, was three years younger than the Queen, and at the time of her marriage was twenty-one years of age. In the cousins' childhood and early youth, during the reign of King William, the Duke of Cambridge had acted as the King's representative in Hanover, so that his family were much in Germany. At the date of the Queen's accession, Princess Augusta, a girl of fifteen, was considered old enough to appear with the rest of the royal family at the banquet at Guildhall, and in the other festivities which commemorated the beginning of the new reign. She figures in the various pictures of the Coronation, the Queen's marriage, &c. &c., and won the enthusiastic admiration of Leslie when he went to Cambridge House to take the portraits of the different members of the family for one of his pictures. Only a year before she had, in the character of Princess Claude of France, been one of the most graceful masquers at the Queen's Plantagenet Ball, and among the bridesmaids on the present occasion were two of the beauties at the ball, Lady Alexandrina Vane and Lady Clementina Villiers. Princess Augusta was marrying a young German prince, three years her senior, a kinsman of her father's through his mother, Queen Charlotte. She was going to the small northern duchy which had sent so brave a little queen to England.
Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and all the royal family in the country, including the King of Hanover, who had remained to grace the ceremony, were present at the wedding, which, in old fashion, took place in the evening. Among the foreign guests were the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Prince and Princess of Oldenburg, the Crown Prince of Wurtemburg, &c. &c. The ambassadors, Cabinet Ministers, and officers of State were in attendance. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishops of London and Norwich, officiated. The marriage was registered and attested in the great dining room at Buckingham Palace. Then there passed away from the scene the Princess who had been for some years the solitary representative of the royal young ladyhood of England, as her sister, Princess Mary, was eleven years Princess Augusta's junior, and still only a little girl of ten. Princess Augusta had an annuity of three thousand a year voted to her by Parliament on her marriage.
A month later, on the 28th of August, the Queen went by railway to Southampton, in order to go on board the royal yacht for a trip to the Isle of Wight and the Devonshire coast. At Southampton Pier, the rain was falling heavily. Her Majesty had been received by the Mayor and Corporation, the Duke of Wellington, and other official personages, when it was discovered that there was not sufficient covering for the stage or gangway, which was to be run out between the pier and the yacht. Then the members of the Southampton Corporation were moved to follow the example of Sir Walter Raleigh in the service which introduced him to the notice of Queen Elizabeth. They pulled off their red gowns, spread them on the gangway, and so procured a dry footing for her Majesty.
Lady Bloomfield, as Miss Liddell, in the capacity of Maid of Honour in waiting, was with the Queen, and has furnished a few particulars of the pleasant voyage. The Queen landed frequently, returning to the yacht at night and sleeping on board. At the Isle of Wight she visited Norris Castle, where she had stayed in her youth, asking to see some of the rooms, and walking on the terrace. She told her companions that she would willingly have bought the place but could not afford it. At one point all the party except Lady Canning were overcome by sea sickness, which is no respecter of persons. At Dartmouth the Queen entered her barge and was rowed round the harbour, for the better inspection of the place, and the gratification of the multitude on the quays and in every description of sailing craft. At Plymouth the visitors landed and proceeded to Mount Edgcumbe, the beautiful seat of the Edgcumbe family. Wherever her Majesty went she made collections of flowers, which she had dried and kept as mementoes of the scenes in which they had been gathered. In driving through Plymouth, the crowd was so great, and pressed so much on the escort, that the infantry bayonets crossed in the carriages.
At Falmouth, the Queen was again rowed in her barge round the harbour, but the concourse of small boats became dangerous, as their occupants deserted the helms and rushed to one side to see the Queen, and the royal barge could only be extricated by the rowers exerting their utmost strength and skill, and forcing a passage through the swarming flotilla. The Mayor of Falmouth was a Quaker, and asked permission to keep on his hat while reading his address to the Queen. The Mayor of Truro, who with the Mayor of Penryn had accompanied their official brother when he put off in a small boat to intercept her Majesty in her circuit round the harbour, was doomed to play a more undignified part. He unluckily overleaped himself and fell into the water, so that he and his address, being too wet for presentation, were obliged to be put on shore again.
On board the Queen used to amuse herself with a favourite occupation of the ladies of the day, plaiting paper so as to resemble straw plait for bonnets. She was sufficiently skilled in the art to instruct her Maid of Honour in it.
On one occasion the Queen chanced to have her camp-stool set where it shut up the door of the place that held the sailors' grog-tubs. After much hanging about and consulting with the authorities, she was made acquainted with the fact, when she rose on condition that a glass of grog should be brought to her. She tasted it and said, "I am afraid I can only make the same remark I did once before, that I think it would be very good if it were stronger," an observation that called forth the unqualified delight of the men. Sometimes in the evening the sailors, at her Majesty's request, danced hornpipes on deck.
But the Queen's cruises this year were not to end on English or even Scotch ground. She was to make the first visit to France which had been paid by an English sovereign since Henry VIII. met Francis I. on the field of the Cloth of Gold. Earlier in the year two of Louis Philippe's sons, the sailor Prince Joinville, "tall, dark, and good looking, with a large beard, but, unfortunately for him, terribly deaf," and his brother, the man of intellect and culture if not of genius, the Duc d'Aumale, "much shorter and very fair," had been together at Windsor; and had doubtless arranged the preliminaries of the informal visit which the Queen was to pay to Louis Philippe. The King of France and his large family were in the habit of spending some time in summer or autumn at Chateau d'Eu, near the seaport of Treport, in Normandy; and to this point the Queen could easily run across in her yacht and exchange friendly greetings, without the elaborate preparations and manifold trouble which must be the accompaniment of a State visit to the Tuileries.
Accordingly the Queen and Prince Albert, on the 1st of September, sailed past the Eddystone Lighthouse, where they were joined by a little fleet of war-ships, and struck off for the coast of France. Besides her suite, the Queen was accompanied by two of her ministers, Lords Aberdeen and Liverpool. With the first, a shrewd worthy Scot, distinguished as a statesman by his experience, calm sagacity, and unblemished integrity, her Majesty and Prince Albert were destined to have cordial relations in the years to come.
In the meantime, French country people were pouring into Treport, where the King's barge lay ready. It was provided with a crimson silk awning, having white muslin curtains over a horseshoe-shaped seat covered with crimson velvet, capable of containing eleven or twelve persons. The rowers were clad in white, with red sashes and, red ribands round their hats.
The Queen was to land by crossing the deck of a vessel moored along the quay and mounting a ladder, the steps of which were covered with crimson velvet. At five o'clock in the afternoon the King and his whole family, a great cortege, arrived on horseback and in open chars-a-bancs. Prince Joinville had met the yacht at Cherbourg and gone on board. As soon as it lay-to the King came alongside in his barge. The citizen King was stout, florid, and bluff-looking, with thick grizzled hair brushed up into a point. As the exiled Duke of Orleans, in the days of the great Revolution, he had been a friend of the Queen's father, the Duke of Kent. The King did not fail to remind his guest of this, after he had kissed her on each check, kissed her hand, and told her again and again how delighted he was to see her. When the two sovereigns entered the barge the standards of England and France were hoisted together, and amidst royal salutes from the vessels in the roads and from the batteries on shore, to the music of regimental bands, in the sunset of a fine autumn evening the party landed.
At the end of the jetty the ladies of the royal family of France with their suites stood in a curved line. Queen Amelie, with her snowy curls and benevolent face, was two paces in advance of the others. Behind her were her daughter and daughter-in-law, the Queen of the Belgians and the widowed Duchesse d'Orleans, who appeared in public for the first time since her husband's death a year before. A little farther back stood Madame Adelaide, the King's sister, and the other princesses, the younger daughter and the daughters-in-law of the house. Louis Philippe presented Queen Victoria to his Queen, who "took her by both hands and saluted her several times on both cheeks with evident warmth of manner." Queen Louise, and at least one of the other ladies, were well known to the visitor, whom they greeted gladly, while the air was filled with shouts of "Vive la Reine Victoria!" "Vive la Reine d'Angleterre!"
The Queen, who was dressed simply, as usual, in a purple satin gown, a black mantilla trimmed with lace, and a straw bonnet with straw-coloured ribands and one ostrich feather, immediately entered the King's char-a-bancs, which had a canopy and curtains that were left open. Lady Bloomfield describes it as drawn by twelve large clumsy horses. There was a coachman on the box, with three footmen behind, and there was "a motley crowd of outriders on wretched horses and dressed in different liveries." The other chars-a-bancs with six horses followed, and the whole took their, way to the Chateau, a quaint and pleasant dwelling, some of it as old as the time of the Great Mademoiselle.
A stately banquet was held in the evening in the banqueting-room, hung round with royal portraits and historical pictures, the table heavy with gold and silver plate, including the gold plateau and the great gold vases filled with flowers. The King, in uniform, sat at the centre of the table. He had on his right hand Queen Victoria, wearing a gown of crimson velvet, the order of the garter and a parure of diamonds and emeralds, but having her hair simply braided. On her other side sat Prince Joinville. On the King's left hand was Queen Louise. The Duchesse d'Orleans, in accordance with French etiquette for widows in their weeds, did not come to the dinner-table. Opposite the King sat his Queen, with Prince Albert on her right hand and the Duc d'Aumale on her left. The royal host and hostess carved like any other old-fashioned couple.
The Queen received the same lively impressions from her first visit to France that she had experienced on her first visit to Scotland. Apart from the scenery there was yet more to strike her. The decidedly foreign dresses of the people, the strange tongue, the mill going on Sunday, the different sound of the church bells—nothing escaped her. There was also, in the large family of her brother king and ally—connected with her by so many ties, every member familiar to her by hearsay, if not known to her personally—much to interest her. The Queen had been, to all intents and purposes, brought up like an only child, and her genial disposition had craved for entire sympathy and equal companionship. She seems to have regarded wistfully, as an only child often regards, what she had never known, the full, varied, yet united life of a large, happy, warmly attached family circle. When she saw her children possessed of the blessing which had been denied to her in her early days, she was tempted to look back on the widowed restricted household in Kensington Palace as on a somewhat chill and grey environment. She has more than once referred to her childhood as dull and sad by comparison with what she lived to know of the young life of other children.
But the great royal household of France at this date, in addition to its wealth of interests and occupations, and its kindness to the stranger who was so quick to respond to kindness, was singularly endowed with elements of attractiveness for Queen Victoria. It appeared, indeed, as if all life at its different stages, in its different aspects, even in its different nationalities, met and mingled with a wonderful charm under the one roof-tree. Besides the old parent couple and the maiden aunt, who had seen such changes of fortune, there were three young couples, each with their several careers before them. There was the bride of yesterday, the youngest daughter of the house, Princess Clementine, with her young German husband, the Queen and Prince Albert's kinsman; there was Nemours, wedded to another German cousin, the sweet-tempered golden-haired Princess Victoire; there was Joinville, with his dark-haired Brazilian Princess. [Footnote: A kinswoman of Maria da Gloria's] It had been said that he had gone farther, as became a sailor, in search of a wife than any other prince in Europe. She was very pretty in a tropical fashion, very piquante, and, perhaps, just a little sauvage. She had never seen snow, and the rules and ceremonies of a great European court were almost as strange to her. Lady Bloomfield mentions her as if she were something of a spoilt child who could hardly keep from showing that the rigid laws of her new position fretted and bored her. She wore glowing pomegranate blossoms in her hair, and looked pensive, as if she were pining for the gorgeous little hummingbirds and great white magnolias—the mixture of natural splendour and ease, passion and languor, of a typical South American home.
D'Aumale and Montpensier were still gay young bachelors, and well would it have been for the welfare of the Orleans family and the credit of Louis Philippe if one of them had remained so. There was a widow as well as a bride in the house. There were the cherished memories of a dearly-prized lost son and daughter to touch with tender sorrow its blithest moments and lightest words. The Queen had to make the acquaintance of Helene, Duchesse d'Orleans; [Footnote: Princess Helena of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.] tall, thin and pale, not handsome, but better than handsome, full of character and feeling, shrinking from observation in her black dress, with the shadow of a life-long grief over her heart and life. And the visitor had to hear again of the gifted Princess Marie, the friend of Ary Scheffer, whose statue of Jeanne d'Arc is the best monument of a life cut down in its brilliant promise. Princess Marie's devoted sister Louise, Queen of the Belgians, in her place as the eldest surviving daughter of France, had long been Queen Victoria's great friend. Finally, there was the third generation, headed by the fatherless boy, "little Paris," with regard to whom few then doubted that he would one day sit on the throne of France.
It was not principally because the Chateau d'Eu was in France that the Queen wrote, the first morning she awoke there, the fulfilment of her favourite air-castle of so many years was like a dream, or that she grieved when her visit was over. She sought to find, and believed she had found, a whole host of new friends and kindred—another father and mother, more brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, to make her life still richer and more full of kindly ties.
The speciality in the form of entertainment at Chateau d'Eu was drives in the sociable chars-a-bancs in the neighbouring forest, ending in dejeuners and fetes-champetres, which the Queen enjoyed heartily, both because they were novel to her and because they were spontaneous and untrammelled. "So pretty, so merry, so rural," she declared. "Like the fetes in Germany," Prince Albert said. The long, frequently rough drives under the yellowing trees in the golden September light, the camp-chairs, the wine in plain bottles, the improvised kitchen hidden among the bushes, the many young people of high rank all so gay, the king full of liveliness and brusqueness, his queen full of motherliness and consideration for all—everything was delightful.
One pathetic little incident occurred when the guests were being shown over the parish church of Notre Dame. As they came to the crypt, with its ancient monuments of the Comtes d'Eu, the Duchesse d'Orleans was overcome with emotion, and the Queen of the Belgians drew her aside. When the rest of the party passed again through the church, on their way back, they came upon the two mourning women prostrate before one of the altars, the Duchesse weeping bitterly.
The King presented Queen Victoria with fine specimens of Gobelin tapestry and of Sevres china. He went farther in professions and compliments. He was not content to leave the discussion of politics to M. Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. Louis Philippe volunteered to the Queen's minister the statement that he would not give his son to Spain (referring to a proposed marriage between the Duc de Montpensier and the Infanta Luisa, the sister of the young Queen Isabella, who had been lately declared of age), even if he were asked. To which the stout Scot replied, without beating about the bush, "that except one of the sons of France, any aspirant whom Spain might choose would be acceptable to England."
Louis Philippe, Queen Amelie, and the whole family escorted the Queen and the Prince on board the yacht, parting with them affectionately. Prince Joinville accompanied the couple to the Pavilion, Brighton. In the course of the sail there was a race between his ship and the Black Eagle, in which the English vessel won, to the French sailors' disgust.
Louis Philippe felt great satisfaction at a visit which proved his cordial relations with England, and served to remove the reproach which he seemed to think clung to him and prevented the other European royal families from fraternising with him and his children as they would otherwise have done—namely, that he was not the representative of the elder, and what many were pleased to consider the legitimate, branch of the Bourbons. He was but a king set up by the people, whom the people might pull down again. There was not much apparent prospect of this overthrow then, though the forces were at work which brought it about. In token of his gratification, and as a memorial of what had given him so much pleasure, the King caused a series of pictures to be taken of Queen Victoria's landing, and of the various events of her stay. These pictures remain, among several series, transferred to the upper rooms of one of the French palaces, and furnish glimpses of other things that have vanished besides the fashion of the day. There the various groups reappear. Queen Amelie with her piled-up curls, the citizen King and their numerous young people doing honour to the young Queen of England and her husband, both looking juvenile in their turn—all the more so for a certain antiquated cut in their garments at this date, a formality in his hat and neckerchief, a demureness in her close bonnet, and a pretty show of youthful matronliness in the little lace cap which, if we mistake not, she wears on one occasion.