There on horseback takes the air.
Chains and maces all attend, he
Rides all glorious to be seen;
‘Lad o’ wax!’ great heaven forfend he
Don’t get spilt before the Queen.”
He did not get spilt as did one of the Aldermen seven years earlier, but he had a curious mishap. It was muddy weather, and he put on enormous jack-boots over his dandy shoes and stockings to keep them clean. Waiting at Temple Bar, he tried to take off the boots when Her Majesty was near, but they were too tight, and would not move. One of the spurs caught an Alderman’s robe and tore it, so his friends came to his aid, the Lord Mayor standing on one leg while they tugged. One boot came off, and they started on the other, but it remained firm, the crowd watching in uproarious glee. When at last the Queen was but a few paces away, the agonised City King roared, “For God’s sake, put my boot on again!” So, backed by half a dozen friends and tugged at by another half dozen, he recovered the displaced boot, and had to wear both of them until after the banquet, when a less frantic effort removed them.
When the Whigs came back to power in 1846, for Peel’s return to office was of short duration, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, found that he had to deal with a two-in-one Monarch. He was never received alone by the Queen. She and the Prince were always together, and both of them always said, We. This was far better than the early exclusion of the Prince, though it naturally led at once to the assertion on the part of the men that while the Queen bore the title, the Prince discharged the function of the Sovereign. The Prince had devoted himself to her and to her country with marvellous assiduity and rectitude; indeed, if he had taken the work more lightly and interfered less in the detail of matters, he might not have succumbed as he practically did to hard work. In 1862 the Duke of Gotha said that his brother, Prince Albert, had killed himself with hard work, and that from the time he came to England he did not know what it was to have “a joyous day.” Stockmar’s influence in this respect was to be deplored. He was like a Dutch art student with whom I once worked: “You paint the trees and get their character,” she said, “but I—I see all the little leafs, and must paint them.”
After the Prince’s death Lord Clarendon wrote:—“There is a vague belief that his influence was great and useful; but there is a very dim perception of the modus operandi.... Peel certainly took the Prince into council much more than Melbourne, who had his own established position with the Queen before the Prince came to this country; but I cannot tell you whether it was Peel who first gave him a Cabinet key. My impression is that Lord Duncannon, during the short time he was Home Secretary, sent the Prince a key when the Queen was confined, and the contents of the boxes had to be read and signed by her.”
Among those who helped to form Lord John Russell’s Government was the historian Macaulay, who became Paymaster-General; under Melbourne he had been Secretary at War. He could talk for hours without stopping, and Fanny Kemble said of him, “He is like nothing in the world but Bayle’s Dictionary, continued down to the present time, and purified from all objectionable matter. Such a Niagara of information did surely never pour from the lips of mortal man!” Someone else remarked that, “Macaulay is laying waste society with his waterspouts of talk; people in his company burst for want of an opportunity of dropping in a word;” and Sydney Smith also once said of him to Melbourne that he was a book in breeches. This, of course, Melbourne repeated to the Queen, so for a long time after whenever she saw her Secretary at War she went into fits of laughter. She once at Windsor offered him a horse to ride, drawing from him the remark, “If I ride anything, it must be an elephant”—thus alluding to his inability to remain on a horse if he once mounted. After dining at the Palace in March, 1850, he wrote: “The Queen was most gracious to me. She talked much about my book, and owned that she had nothing to say for her poor ancestor James the Second. ‘Not your Majesty’s ancestor,’ said I; ‘your Majesty’s predecessor.’ I hope this was not an uncourtly correction. I meant it as a compliment, and she seemed to take it so.”
When Peel resigned office in 1846 he begged the Queen to grant him one favour, and that was never to ask him to take service again; however, his political ardour was too great a habit to be repressed, and he was speedily leading the Opposition. He fell from his horse in 1850, and died four days after the accident.