CHAPTER XVII. THE QUEEN'S TRIP TO OSTEND:—VISITS TO DRAYTON, CHATSWORTH, AND BELVOIR.
"Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute." In the course of another week the Queen took a second trip to the Continent, sailing to Ostend to pay the most natural visit in the world—the only thing singular about it was that it had been so long delayed—to her uncle, King Leopold. The yacht, which had been lying off Brighton, was accompanied by eight other steamers, and joined at Walmer by two ships of the line. At Dover a salute was fired from the castle. At Deal the Duke of Wellington came on board and dined with the royal party, the Queen watching with some anxiety the return of the old man in his boat, through a considerable surf which wetted him thoroughly, before he mounted his horse and rode off to Walmer, to superintend the illumination of the Castle in lines of light. In like manner every ship lying in the Downs glittered through the darkness.
At two o'clock on the following afternoon the Queen and the Prince reached Ostend, where they were received by King Leopold and Queen Louise. There had been some uncertainty whether the travellers, after not too smooth a passage, would be equal to the fatigue of a banquet at the Hotel de Ville that evening. But repose is the good thing to which royalty can rarely attain, so it was settled that the banquet should go on. The display was less, and there was more of undress among the chief personages than there had been at the opening banquet at Chateau d'Eu. The Queen must have looked to her host not far removed from the docile young niece he had so carefully trained and tutored, as she sat by him in white lace and muslin, with flowers in her hair—only bound by a ferroniere of diamonds. The King and Prince Albert were in plain clothes, save that they showed the ribands and insignia of the orders of the Garter and the Bath; the Queen of the Belgians wore a white lace bonnet. It was in the main a simple family party made for the travellers.
The next day the Prince and Princess of Hohenlohe arrived, when the elder sister would have knelt and paid her homage to the younger, had not her Majesty prevented her with a sisterly embrace. Ostend was the head-quarters of the royal party, from which in the mellow autumn time they visited Bruges and Ghent. "The old cities of Flanders had put on their fairest array and were very tastefully decorated with tapestries, flowers, trees, pictures, &c. &c." The crowds of staid Flemings wore stirred up to joyous enthusiasm.
The Queen's artistic tastes, in addition to her fresh sympathies and her affection for her uncle and his wife, rendered the whole scene delightful to her. She was fitted to relish each detail, from the carillons to the carvings. She inspected all that was to be seen at Bruges, from the Palace of Justice to the Chapel of the Holy Blood. At Ghent, she went to the church of St. Bavon, where the Van Eycks have left the best part of their wonderful picture before the altar while the dust of Hubert and Margaret, rests in the crypt below. She saw the fragment of the palace in which John of Gaunt was born, when an English queen-consort, Philippa, resided there five hundred years before. She visited the old Beguinage, with the shadowlike figures of the nuns in black and white flitting to and fro.
From Ostend the Queen and Prince Albert proceeded to the cheerful, prosperous, and, by comparison, modern town of Brussels, King Leopold's capital, and stayed a night at his palace of Lacken, which had been built by Prince Albert's ancestor and namesake, Duke Albert of Sechsen, when he governed the Netherlands along with his wife the Archduchess Christina, the favourite daughter of Maria Theresa and the sister of Marie Antoinette. From Brussels the travellers journeyed to Antwerp, where they saw another grand cathedral and witnessed the antique spectacle of "the Giant" before the palace in the Place de Mer.
On leaving Antwerp, the Queen and the Prince sailed for England, escorted so far on their way by King Leopold and Queen Louise. "It was such a joy to me," her Majesty wrote to her uncle, soon after their parting, "to be once again under the roof of one who has ever been a father to me." The vessel lay all night in Margate Roads, and the next morning arrived at Woolwich.
In the month of October her Majesty and the Prince visited Cambridge, where he received his degree of LL.D. A witty letter, written by Professor Sedgwick, describing the royal visit to the Woodwardian Museum, is quoted by Sir Theodore Martin
"….I received a formidable note from our master telling me of an intended royal visit to the Woodwardian den of wild beasts, immediately after Prince Albert's degree; and enjoining me to clear a passage by the side entrance through the old divinity schools. This threw me off my balance, for since the building of the new library this place of ancient theological disputation has been converted into a kind of lumber-room, and was filled from end to end with every kind of unclean things—mops, slop-pails, chimney-pots, ladders, broken benches, rejected broken cabinets, two long ladders, and an old rusty scythe were the things that met the eye, and all covered with half an inch of venerable dust. There is at the end of the room a kind of gallery or gangway, by which the undergraduates used to find their way to my lecture-room, but this was also full of every kind of rubbish and abomination. We did our best; soon tumbled all impediments into the area below, spread huge mats over the slop-pails, and, in a time incredibly short, a goodly red carpet was spread along the gangway, and thence down my lecture-room to the door of the Museum. But still there was a dreadful evil to encounter. What we had done brought out such a rank compound of villanous smells that even my plebeian nose was sorely put to it; so I went to a chemist's, procured certain bottles of sweet odours, and sprinkled them cunningly where most wanted.
"Inside the Museum all was previously in order, and inside the entrance door from the gangway was a huge picture of the Megatherium, under which the Queen must pass to the Museum, and at that place I was to receive her Majesty. So I dusted my outer garments and ran to the Senate House, and I was just in time to see the Prince take his degree and join in the acclamations. This ended, I ran back to the feet of the Megatherium, and in a few minutes the royal party entered the mysterious gangway above described. They halted, I half thought in a spirit of mischief, to contemplate the furniture of the schools, and the Vice-chancellor (Whewell) pointed out the beauties of the dirty spot where Queen Bess had sat two hundred and fifty years before, when she presided at the Divinity Act. A few steps more brought them under the feet of the, Megatherium. I bowed as low as my anatomy would let me, and the Queen and Prince bowed again most graciously, and so began act first. The Queen seemed happy and well pleased, and was mightily taken with one or two of my monsters, especially with the 'Plesiosaurus,' and a gigantic stag. The subject was new to her; but the Prince evidently had a good general knowledge of the old world, and not only asked good questions and listened with great courtesy to all I had to say, but in one or two instances helped me on by pointing to the rare things in my collection, especially in that part of it which contains the German fossils. I thought myself very fortunate in being able to exhibit the finest collection of German fossils to be seen in England. They fairly went the round of the Museum, neither of them seemed in a hurry, and the Queen was quite happy to hear her husband talk about a novel subject with so much knowledge and spirit. He called her back once or twice to look at a fine impression of a dragon-fly which I have in the Solenhope slate. Having glanced at the long succession of our fossils, from the youngest to the oldest, the party again moved into the lecture-room. The Queen was again mightily taken with the long neck of the Plesiosaurus; under it was a fine head of an Ichthyosaurus which I had just been unpacking. I did not know anything about it, as I had myself never seen its face before, for it arrived in my absence. The Queen asked what it was. I told her as plainly as I could. She then asked whence it came; and what do you think I said? That I did not know the exact place, but I believed it came as a delegate from the monsters of the lower world to greet her Majesty on her arrival at the University. I did not repeat this till I found that I had been overheard, and that my impertinence had been talked of among my Cambridge friends. All was, however, taken in good part, and soon afterwards the royal party again approached the mysterious gangway. The Queen and Prince bowed, the Megatherium packed up his legs close under the abdominal region of his august body, the royal pageant passed under, and was soon out of my sight and welcomed by the cheers of the multitude before the library.
"I will only add that I went through every kind of backward movement to admiration of all beholders, only having once trodden on the hinder part of my cassock, and never once having fallen during my retrogradations before the face of the Queen. In short, had I been a king crab, I could not have walked backwards better."
When in Cambridgeshire the Queen and the Prince visited Lord Hardwicke at
Wimpole, where the whole county was assembled at a ball, and Earl De la
Warr at Bourne.
In this month of October the great agitator for the repeal of the Irish Union, Daniel O'Connell, was arrested, in company with other Irish agitators, on a charge of sedition and conspiracy. After a prolonged trial, which lasted to the early summer of the following year, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and the payment of a fine of two thousand pounds, with recognisances to keep the peace for seven years. The sentence lapsed on technical grounds, but its moral effect was considerable.
In the month of September the Queen and Prince Albert visited Sir Robert Peel at Drayton, travelling by railroad, with every station they passed thronged by spectators. At Rugby the pupils of the great school, headed by Dr. Tait, were drawn up on the platform. Sir Robert Peel received his guests in a pavilion erected for the occasion, and conducted her Majesty to her carriage, round which was an escort of Staffordshire yeomanry. At the entrance to the town of Tamworth, the mayor, kneeling, presented his mace, with the words, "I deliver to your Majesty the mace;" to which the Queen replied, "Take it, it cannot be in better hands."
At eight o'clock in the evening Sir Robert Peel conducted the Queen, who wore pink silk and a profusion of emeralds and diamonds, to the dining-room, Prince Albert giving his arm to Lady Peel. Among the guests were the Duke of Wellington and the Duke and Duchess of Buccleugh. The Duchess on one occasion during the visit wore an old brocade which had belonged to a great grand-aunt of the Duke's, and was pronounced very beautiful. After dinner the party withdrew to the library. Either on this evening or the next the Queen played at the quaint old game of "Patience," with some of her ladies, while the gentlemen "stood about."
On the following day her Majesty walked in the grounds, while Prince Albert gratified an earnest wish by visiting Birmingham and inspecting its manufactures, undeterred, perhaps rather allured, by the fact that the great town of steel and iron was regarded as one of the centres of Chartism. This did not prevent its mighty population from displaying the most exultant loyalty as they pressed round the carriage in which the Prince and the Mayor, reported to be a rank Chartist, drove to glass and silver-plate manufactories and papier-mache works, the town hall, and the schools.
At the railway station the Prince was joined by the Queen-dowager and Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, who came from Whitley Court to accompany him back to Drayton. The next morning was devoted to shooting, when Prince Albert confirmed his good character as a sportsman by bringing down sixty pheasants, twenty-five hares, eight rabbits, one woodcock, and two wild ducks. In the afternoon the Queen visited Lichfield, to which she had gone as "the young Princess." Indeed, the next part of the tour was over old ground in Derbyshire, for from Drayton the royal couple proceeded to Chatsworth, and spent several days amidst the beauties of the Peak. Twenty thousand persons were assembled in the magnificent grounds at Chatsworth, and artillery had been brought from Woolwich to fire a salute. Many old friends, notably members of the great Whig houses—Lord Melbourne, Lord and Lady Palmerston, the Marquis and Marchioness of Normanby—met to grace the occasion. There was a grand ball, at which the aristocracy of invention and industry, trade and wealth, represented by the Arkwrights and the Strutts, mingled with the autocracy of ancient birth and landed property. Mrs. Arkwright was presented to the Queen. Her Majesty opened the ball with the Duke of Devonshire, dancing afterwards with Lord Morpeth and Lord Leveson—in the last instance, "a country dance, with much vigour"—and waltzing with Prince Albert. On the 2nd of December the party visited Haddon Hall, the ancient seat of the Vernons, where Dorothy Vernon lived and loved. On their return in the evening, the great conservatory was brilliantly illuminated, and there was a display of fireworks.
On the 3rd, Sunday, the Queen walked through the kitchen gardens and botanical gardens, and drove to Edensor. On the return of the party by the Home Farm, they went to see a prize-pig, weighing seventy pounds. The day ended with a concert of sacred music.
On Monday, the 4th, the Queen and the Prince parted from the Duke of Devonshire at Derby, and proceeded to Nottingham—not to visit what remained of the Castle so long associated with John and Lucy Hutchinson, or to penetrate to the cradle of hosiery, daring an encounter with the "Nottingham Lambs," the roughest of roughs, who at election times were wont to add to their natural beauties by painting their faces red, white, and blue, as savages tattoo themselves—but as a step on the way to Belvoir, the seat of the Duke of Rutland. There her Majesty entered that most aristocratic portion of England known as "The Dukeries." The Duke of Rutland, attended by two hundred of his tenantry on horseback, awaited his guests at Red Mile, and rode with them the three miles to Belvoir. Soon after the Queen's arrival, Dr. Stanton presented her Majesty with the key of Stanton Town, according to the tenure on which that estate is held.
Belvoir was a sight in itself, even after the stately lawns of Chatsworth. "I do not know whether you ever saw Belvoir," writes Fanny Kemble; "it is a beautiful place; the situation is noble, and the views, from the windows of the castle, and the terraces and gardens hanging over the steep hill crowned by it, is charming. The whole vale of Belvoir, and miles of meadow and woodland, lie stretched below it, like a map unrolled to the distant horizon, presenting extensive and varied prospects in every direction; while from the glen which surrounds the castle-hill, like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the snatches of birds' carolling, and cawing rooks' discourse, float up to one from the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands on the battlemented terraces."
December was not the best time for seeing some of the attractions of Belvoir; but Lady Bloomfield has written of her Majesty's proverbial good fortune in these excursions: "The Queen yachts during the equinox, and has the sea a dead calm; visits about in the dead of winter, and has summer weather." There were other respects in which Belvoir was in its glory in midwinter—it belonged to a hunting neighbourhood and a hunting society. Whereas at Drayton and Chatsworth the royal pair had been principally surrounded by Tory and Whig statesmen, at Belvoir, while the Queen-dowager and some of the most distinguished members of the company at Chatsworth were again of the party, the Queen and the Prince found themselves in the centre of the fox-hunters of Melton Mowbray.
Happily, the Prince could hunt with the best, and the Queen liked to look on at her husband's sport, so that the order of the day was the throwing off of the hounds at Croxton. In the evening the Queen played whist. The next day there was a second splendid meet royally attended, with cards again at night. The Prince wrote of one of these "runs," to Baron Stockmar, that he had distinguished himself by keeping up with the hounds all through. "Anson" and "Bouverie" had both fallen on his left and right, but he had come off "with a whole skin." We are also told that the Prince's horsemanship excited the amazed admiration of the spectators, to the Queen's half-impatient amusement. "One can scarcely credit the absurdity of the people," she wrote to her uncle, King Leopold; "but Albert's riding so boldly has made such a sensation that it has been written all over the country, and they make much more of it than if he had done some great act." Apparently the Melton Mowbray fox-hunters had, till now, hardly appreciated that fine combination of physical and mental qualities, which is best expressed in two lines of an old song:—
His step is foremost in the ha',
His sword in battle keen.
On the 7th of December the visitors left for Windsor, passing through endless triumphal arches on the road, greeted at Leicester by seven thousand school children.
Shortly after the Queen's return home, she and the Prince heard, with regret, of the death of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch. The veteran fell, indeed, like a shock of corn ripe for the garner, until it had been difficult to recognise in the feeble, nearly blind old man, upwards of ninety, the stout soldier of Barossa and Vittoria. But he carried with him many a memory which could never be recalled. Gallant captain though he was, his whole life was touched with tender romance. Born only four years after the Jacobite rebellion of '45, married in 1774, when he was twenty-five years of age, to his beautiful wife, the Hon. Mary Cathcart—whose sister Jane was married on the same day to John, Duke of Athole—for eighteen years Mr. Graham lived the quiet life of a country gentleman in Lynedoch Cottage, the most charming of cottages ornes, thatch-roofed, with a conservatory as big as itself, set down in a fine park. The river Almond flowed by, serving as a kind of boundary, and marking the curious limit which the plague kept in its last visit to Scotland. On a green "haugh" beneath what is known as the Burnbraes, within a short distance of Lynedoch Cottage, may be seen the carefully-kept double grave of two girls heroines of Scotch song, who died there of the "pest," from which they were fleeing.
Mr. Graham was happy in his marriage, though it is said Mrs. Graham did not relish that element in her lot which had made her the wife of a simple commoner, while her sister, not more fair, was a duchess. Death entered on the scene, and caused the distinctions of rank to be forgotten. The cherished wife was laid in a quiet grave in Methven kirk-yard, and the childless widower mourned for the desire of his heart with a grief that refused to be comforted. By the advice of his friends, who feared for his reason or his life, he went abroad, where he joined Lord Hood as a volunteer. It is said he fought his first battle in a black coat, with the hope that, being thus rendered conspicuous in any act of daring which he might perform, he would be stricken down before the day was done. Honours, not death, were to be his portion in his new career. A commission, rapid promotion, the praise of his countrymen followed. He received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. It was on this occasion that Sheridan said eloquently, in allusion to the soldier's services in the retreat to Corunna, "In the hour of peril Graham was their best adviser, in the hour of disaster Graham was their surest consolation." A peerage, which there was none to share or inherit, a pension, the Orders of the Bath, of St. Michael and St. George, &c. &c., were conferred upon him. It seemed only the other day since Lord Lynedoch, hearing of her Majesty's first visit to Scotland, hurried home from Switzerland to receive his queen. A place in Westminster Abbey was ready for all that was mortal of him, but he had left express injunctions that he was to be buried in Methven kirk-yard, beside the wife of his youth, dead more than half a century before.
Most people know the history of Gainsborough's lovely picture of Mrs. Graham, the glory of the Scotch National Gallery—that it was not brought home till after the death of the lady, whose husband could not bear to look on her painted likeness, and sent it, in its case, to the care of a London merchant, in whose keeping it remained unopened, and well-nigh forgotten, for upwards of fifty years. On Lord Lynedoch's death, the picture came into the possession of his heir, Mr. Graham, of Redgorton, who presented it—a noble gift—to the Scotch National Academy.