Queen Victoria's permission to wear this medal was accorded to Lord
Hardwicke by the following letter from Lord Clarendon.
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GROSVENOR CRESCENT: July 24, 1855.
'MY DEAR HARDWICKE,
'The Queen's permission has been duly received for you to wear the medal conferred upon you by the King of Sardinia and I have communicated the same officially to the Admiralty.
'Very truly yours,
'CLARENDON.'
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The end of every life is the hardest to describe. The time of rest must come, and with it retirement from public work. The parent begins life again in his children, and in making place for them in the world. We have followed the career of an active and energetic man, who thoroughly lived his life, and enjoyed it. We have seen his first great disappointment in the profession that he loved, when an opportunity offered itself for service under Sir Charles Napier in the Baltic Fleet during the Crimean War. To die in action, fighting for England, was his ambition, and the failure of an opportunity for its fulfilment brought with it much depression.
Meanwhile, however, he lost no time in vain regrets, or ceased from active and useful work on his estate and in his county. We have read a letter describing old 'Wimple' in 1781; I shall now try to carry on the description in few words from 1855. It was a beloved home; we 'were seven,' and in the adjoining rectory lived my uncle the Hon. and Rev. Archdeacon Yorke, Canon of Ely, with six cousins, a merry party in holiday time. The house was big and the furniture, books and pictures fine, but my father's life would have satisfied the severest of socialist critics by its simplicity. Our own dress was scrupulously simple. Our boots I well remember, they were all made by a little hump-back cobbler who lived at New Wimpole, and used to come by the avenue to the 'Big House,' as it was always called, to measure us. These substantial thick boots and leather gaiters from the village shop, with short linsey skirts, formed our walking attire. And in the Christmas holiday we all tore about the muddy fields in 'paper-chases.'