BIRTH OF THE FIRST GREAT-GRANDCHILD—MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF ALBANY— CONCLUSION.
The Queen's first great-grandchild, the child of the Princess of Saxe-
Meiningen, was born on the 12th of May.
On her Majesty's arrival at Balmoral on the 22nd of May she went to see the granite cross erected to the "dear memory" of Alice, Duchess of Hesse, by her "sorrowing mother"
The Queen remained at Balmoral till after the 19th of June, when the melancholy tidings arrived that the Prince Imperial had been killed in the Zulu war. Her Majesty left on the 20th, and crossed over the Tay Bridge, which was destroyed in the terrible gale of the 29th December of the same year.
In 1880 the Queen opened Parliament in person. Her Majesty, accompanied by Princess Beatrice, left Windsor on the 25th of March for Baden-Baden and Darmstadt. The Queen was present at the confirmation of the Princesses Victoria and Elizabeth, and visited the Rosenhöhe, where their mother was buried.
About the same time the ex-Empress Eugénie embarked at Southampton for the Cape of Good Hope, that she might see the place where her son fell on the anniversary of his death.
On the 24th of April the Princess Frederica of Hanover, elder daughter of the late King, was married to Baron von Pawel-Rammingen, who had been equerry to her father, in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. The Queen and several members of the royal family witnessed the ceremony.
In September the Duke of Connaught and his bride were welcomed to Balmoral, and a visit paid to the cairn erected in their honour when their healths were drunk with "three times three" in the presence of the Queen, Princess Beatrice, and the ladies and gentlemen of the household. Later in the autumn the childless widow, the Empress Eugénie, stayed for a little time at Abergeldie.
At the close of 1880 Lord Beaconsfield published his last novel of
"Endymion." George Eliot died on the 22nd December, and in 1881 Thomas
Carlyle died, on the 5th of February, in the eighty-sixth year of his
age.
Her Majesty's eldest grandson, Prince William of Prussia, was married at Berlin on the 27th of February to Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein. The bride was the granddaughter of the Queen's sister, Princess Hohenlohe, and the niece of Prince Christian.
On March 13th the Emperor of Russia was assassinated.
Lord Beaconsfield died on the 19th of April at his house in Curzon
Street. Ten days later the Queen and Princess Beatrice visited
Hughenden while the vault was still open, and placed flowers on the
coffin.
In June Prince Leopold took his seat in the House of Peers on his creation as Duke of Albany.
On the 19th of September President Garfield died, after a long struggle, with the effects of his assassination, when the Queen wrote to Mrs. Garfield her indignation and pity as she had expressed them to the widow of President Lincoln.
In 1882 a monument was erected in Hughenden Church to Lord
Beaconsfield "by his grateful and affectionate sovereign and friend,
"VICTORIA R. I.
Kings love him that speaketh right.
PROVERBS xvi 13."
The Queen's speech on the opening of Parliament in 1882 announced the approaching marriage of the Duke of Albany to Princess Helen of Waldeck.
On the 2nd of March, as her Majesty was entering her carriage at Windsor station, she was fired at by a man named Roderick Maclean, the ball passing between her Majesty and Princess Beatrice. The criminal, who proved to be of respectable antecedents, was arrested and committed for high treason. He was tried, found not guilty on the plea of insanity, and sentenced to be confined during her Majesty's pleasure. Much sympathy and indignation were felt, and addresses were voted by both Houses of Parliament.
The Queen left with Princess Beatrice, twelve days afterwards, by Portsmouth, Cherbourg, and Paris for Mentone, where her Majesty stayed a fortnight.
Princess Helen of Waldeck, accompanied by her parents, arrived on the 25th of April. The King and Queen of the Netherlands, the bride's brother-in-law and sister, came next day, and the marriage was celebrated on the 27th of April in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, before the Queen and the royal family. The Duke of Albany was in his twenty-ninth, and Princess Helen in her twenty-first year. Claremont was assigned to the young couple as their future residence. Eight days after the marriage a sad event broke in on the marriage rejoicings; the bride's sister, Princess William of Wurtemberg, died in childbirth at the age of twenty-three.
On the 6th of May the Queen, with Princess Beatrice, went in state to
Epping Forest, where they were received by the Lord Mayor, the
Sheriffs, and the Duke of Connaught as ranger of the forest. After an
address the Queen declared the forest dedicated to the people's use.
On the same day Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were assassinated in the Phoenix Park, Dublin.
Garibaldi died at Caprera on the 2nd of June.
The Egyptian war broke out, and among the officers who sailed with the troops under Sir Garnet Wolseley in August was the Duke of Connaught. The Duchess and her little daughter were with the Queen at Balmoral, where anxious days were spent as mother and wife waited for the news of battle. Successive telegrams announced that an attack was determined on, that the army had marched, that fighting was going on, and that the enemy had been routed with heavy loss at Tel-el-Kebir. The Queen wrote in her journal "How anxious we felt I need not say, but we tried not to give way…. I prayed earnestly for my darling child, and longed for to-morrow to arrive. Read Korner's beautiful, 'Gebet vor der Schlacht,' 'Vater ich rufe Dich,' ('Prayer before the Battle,' 'Father, I call on Thee'). My beloved husband used to sing it often…."
At last came the welcome telegram, "A great victory, Duke safe and well," and a further telegram with details and the concluding sentence, "Duke of Connaught is well and behaved admirably, leading his brigade to the attack," and great was the joy and thankfulness.
In the meantime the Duke and Duchess of Albany had been expected on their first visit after their marriage, and were met at Ballater. When their healths were drunk with Highland honours, the happy Queen asked her son to propose another toast "to the victorious army in Egypt" coupled with the Duke of Connaught's name, and the health was drunk in the hearing of his proud wife and his unconscious infant in her nurse's arms.
In November the Queen reviewed the troops returned from Egypt in St. James Park, and afterwards distributed war medals to the officers and men.
On the 4th December her Majesty opened the New Law Courts. She was received by the judges and the representatives of the Bar. Lord Chancellor Selborne was raised to the rank of an earl, and knighthood was conferred on the Governors of the Inns of Court.
The Duke of Connaught, accompanied by the Duchess, went to fill a military post in India.
We have seen that Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, her Majesty's fourth and youngest son, who was born on the 7th of April, 1853, had a delicate childhood and boyhood. He suffered from a tendency to haemorrhage on the slightest provocation. Ailments in the joints are apt to accompany such constitutional weakness, and one of Prince Leopold's knees was affected. As he grew up he was again and again brought to the brink of the grave by sudden and violent fits of indisposition. It is hardly necessary to say that the precariousness of Prince Leopold's health, combined as it was with an amiable disposition and intellectual gifts, only served to endear him the more to his family and friends.
The bodily weakness which set the Duke of Albany apart from his elder brothers and from lads of his age, which prevented his being regularly trained either as a soldier or a sailor, in the two professions which have been long held fit for princes, made him peculiarly the home-son of the Queen, and caused him to be much longer associated with her than he might otherwise have been, in her daily life and in her public appearances during the later years of her reign.
It did not follow from this circumstance that Prince Leopold relinquished an independent career or led an idle life. In 1872, when he was in his twentieth year, he matriculated at Oxford, where he kept his terms with credit alike to his original abilities and his conscientious diligence. His honourable and pleasant connection with his university remained a strong tie to the end of his short life, and it was doubtless in relation to Oxford that he came sensibly under the influence of Mr. Buskin.
On leaving college Prince Leopold continued to lead the quiet yet busy life of a scholarly and somewhat artistic young man to whom robust health has been denied. In addition to the many dignities of his rank, including four orders of knighthood, belonging to the Garter, the Thistle, the Star of India, and the Order of St. Michael and St. George, he became a D.O.L. of Oxford in 1876, and in the following year a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. A less characteristic honour given him was the rank of a colonel in the army.
It was a marked feature in Prince Leopold's individuality, as it had been in that of the Prince Consort, that he sought to turn all his gifts and pursuits to practical use, not only in the interests of science and art, but in order to improve the condition and increase the happiness of the Queen his mother's people. His speeches on the increasing occasions when he took the chair at public meetings in aid of the objects he had at heart, were remarkable in so young a man, not only for good taste and for the amount of carefully acquired knowledge they displayed, but for the spirit of enlightened humanity and benevolence which breathed through them. Gradually but surely Prince Leopold's graceful, well-considered, kindly utterances, with which he was ready whenever his services were required, were making a most favourable and permanent impression on the public which was too soon to mourn his loss. The extension of education and of innocent amusements through all classes, the Kyrle Society for the fostering of Art among the homeliest surroundings, the higher and more general cultivation of music, the introduction of lessons in cookery into the poorest schools; were among the schemes which the Duke of Albany warmly advocated.
The Duke's marriage took place, as we have recorded, on the 27th of April, 1882, and in 1883 a daughter was born to him, who received the dear and hallowed name of "Alice."
In March, 1884, the Duke of Albany went to Cannes in order to escape the spring east winds, leaving the Duchess, who was in a delicate state of health, behind him at Claremont. He appeared to profit by his stay of a few weeks in the south of France, was unusually well in health and in excellent spirits, entering generally into the society of the place. But on the 27th of March, in ascending a stair at the Cercle Nautique, he slipped and fell, injuring his ailing knee in a manner in which he had hurt it several times before. He was conveyed in a carriage to the Villa Nevada, at which he was residing, and no danger was apprehended, the Duke writing with his own hand to the Duchess, making light of the accident. During the following night, however, he was observed to breathe heavily, was found to be in a fit, and in a few minutes afterwards, early on the morning of the 28th of March, 1884, he died in the arms of his equerry, Captain Perceval. The melancholy news was telegraphed to Windsor, and broken to the Queen by the Master of her Household, Sir Henry Ponsonby. Under the shock and grief, with which the whole country sympathised, her Majesty's first and constant thought seems to have been for the young widow at desolate Claremont.
The Prince of Wales started for Cannes, and accompanied the remains of his brother to England, the royal yacht Osborne landing them at Portsmouth. On the arrival of the melancholy cavalcade at Windsor, on Friday, the 4th of April, the Queen went with her daughters, Princess Christian and Princess Beatrice, to the railway station to meet the body of the beloved son who had been the namesake of King Leopold, her second father, and the living image in character of the husband she had adored. The coffin was carried by a detachment of the Seaforth Highlanders through the room in which her Majesty awaited the procession, and conveyed to the chapel, where a short service was afterwards held in the presence of the Queen and the near relatives of the dead, and where the nearest of all, the widowed Duchess, paid one brief last visit to the bier.
On the following day, Saturday, the 5th of April, towards noon, the funeral took place, with all the pomp of the late Prince's rank, and all the sorrow which his untimely end and many virtues might well call forth. The Prince of Wales, as chief mourner, was supported by the Crown Prince of Germany, the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, Prince Albert Victor of Wales, and the Duke of Cambridge. The coffin, with its velvet pall nearly hidden by flowers, was again borne by a party of the Seaforth Highlanders to the solemn music of Chopin's "Funeral March" and the firing of the minute-guns, to the principal entrance of St. George's Chapel. Among the same company that had been assembled when the Duke of Albany had been married not two years before, were his father-in-law and sister-in- law, the Prince of Waldeck-Pyrmont, and the Queen of Holland.
While the dirge-like music and the booming of the cannon filled the air, the Queen in deep mourning entered, leaning on the arm of the Princess of Wales, and followed by Princess Christian, the Princesses Louise and Beatrice, and Princess Frederica of Hanover, the royal party being conducted by the Lord Chamberlain to seats near the choir steps. The Duchess of Albany and the Duchess of Edinburgh were unable, from the state of their health, to attend the funeral. As the coffin, every movement of which was regulated by the word of command spoken by the officer appointed for the duty, passed through the screen and entered the choir, the Queen and Princesses rose as if to greet him who came thus for the last time among them. The rest of the company had remained standing from the moment of the Queen's entrance. The Dean of Windsor read the Funeral Service. When the choir sang the anthem, "Blessed are the Departed," the Queen again rose. Lord Brooke, a young man like the Prince who was gone, who had been with him at Oxford, was one of the most intimate of his friends, and had been named one of the executors of his will, threw, with evident emotion, the handful of earth on the coffin while the Dean recited "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
After the singing of the hymn, "Lead kindly light," during which her Majesty stood, she and the Princesses quitted the chapel. Garter-King- at-Arms having proclaimed the style and titles of the deceased, the coffin was lowered into the vault below St. George's Chapel, the Prince of Wales gazing sadly on its descent. The Queen, with her long discipline of sorrow, had in the middle of her affliction preserved her coolness throughout the trying ceremony. Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, had almost completed his thirty-first year. The anniversary of his birthday was on the second day after his funeral.
The Queen has left her mark on the palaces and humbler houses which have been her homes. In indicating it we have nothing to do with grey Windsor in its historical glories, or even in its more picturesque lights. We leave behind the Waterloo Gallery, the Garter-room and the quaint cottages of the Poor Knights in order to point out the touches which are the tokens of Queen Victoria's presence. Though she dwelt here principally in the bright days of her early reign, the chief signs which she will leave behind her are those of her widowhood and of the faithful heart which has never forgotten its kindred dead. The most conspicuous work of the Queen's is the restoration and rechristening of the Wolsey Chapel. As the Albert Chapel, the beautiful little building is fall of the thought of him who was once master here. Its rich mosaics, stained glass, "pictures for eternity" fretted in marble, scriptural allegories of all the virtues—the very medallions of his children which surmount these unfading pictures, are all in his honour. Specially so is the pure white marble figure of the Prince, represented as a knight in armour, lying sword in hand, his feet against the hound—the image of loyalty, while round the pedestal is carved his name and state, and the place of his burial, with the epitaph which fits him well, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course."
In St. George's Chapel her Majesty has erected five monuments. A recumbent marble figure on an alabaster sarcophagus is to her father, who was so fond of the infant daughter whom he left a helpless baby. A white marble statue, larger than life, in royal robes, is to the man who took the Duke of Kent's place, Leopold I., King of the Belgians, of whom his niece could cause to be written with perfect truth "who was as a father to her, and she was to him as a daughter." This statue is reared near the well-known monument to the dead King's never forgotten first wife, Princess Charlotte of Wales. [Footnote: Princess Alice mentions in one of her published letters that King Leopold had entertained a wish that he might be buried in England.] The third and fourth monuments are to the Queen's aunt and cousin, the good Duchess of Gloucester and the late King of Hanover. The last was executed by the Queen's nephew, Count Gleichen (Prince Victor Hohenlohe). The inscription has several pathetic allusions. "Here has come to rest among his kindred, the royal family of England, George V., the last King of Hanover." "Receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved." "In this light he shall see light." The fifth monument has been raised to a young eastern prince, son of Theodore, King of Abyssinia, who came to England as a lad and died here "I was a stranger and ye took me in" is the epitaph.
At the entrance to the fine corridor which runs round two sides of the quadrangle of the Castle, and forms a matchless in-door promenade, is Theed's beautiful group of the Queen and the Prince, conceived and worked out after his death, with the solemn parting of two hearts tenderly attached as the motive of the whole. The figures are not only ideally graceful while the likeness in each is carefully preserved, the expression is beyond praise. The wife clings, in devotion so perfect that impassioned hope contends with chill despair, to the arm of the husband who looks down on her whom he loves best, with fond encouragement and the peace of the blessed already settling on the stainless brow. The inscription is from Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"—
"Allur'd to brighter worlds and led the way,"
It is part of an exquisite passage:—
"And as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledg'd offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reprov'd each dull delay,
Allur'd to brighter worlds, and led the way."
The corridor, among its innumerable vases, cabinets, and pictures of kings and great men—including a fine portrait of Sir Walter Scott— has a whole series of pictures illustrating, the leading events of her Majesty's life, from her "First Council," by Wilkie, through her marriage, the baptisms of the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales, the first reception of Louis Philippe, &c., &c., to the Princess Royal's marriage.
The white drawing-room, said to be a favourite room of her Majesty's, is not far from her private sitting-room on the south-east side of the quadrangle which looks out on the Long Walk and Windsor Forest, the white drawing-room commanding the Home Park.
Going down the stately double avenue of elms called the Long Walk, a lodge and side walk at no great distance lead to Frogmore, with its mausoleum half hidden in luxuriant foliage. In the octagonal building, which forms a cross, and is richly decorated with coloured marbles, is the famous recumbent figure of the Prince in white marble by Baron Marochetti. When the Queen's time comes, which her people pray may still be far distant, she will rest by her husband's side, and a similar statue to his will mark where she lies. Memorials of Princess Alice and of her Majesty's dead grandchildren are also here.
The late Duchess of Kent is buried in a separate vault beneath a dome supported by pillars of polished granite and surrounded by a parapet with balconies. In the upper chamber, lit from the top by stained glass, is a statue of the Duchess, by Theed.