The Princess showed almost from the day of her birth a very remarkable degree of intelligence. Numerous anecdotes are given of her cleverness and droll sayings as a little girl. The refrain of most of the stories about the Royal children is the Princess Royal’s intelligence, and the merry, happy, affectionate disposition of the Prince of Wales. The little Princess was christened on the anniversary of her parents’ marriage, February 10, 1841, and received the names of Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa. Two days after this, the Prince had a narrow escape of a painful death, for, in skating on the lake in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, he broke through the ice into deep water. Fortunately the Queen, who was on the bank, did not lose her presence of mind, but did the right thing for affording the Prince the immediate assistance necessary.
The birth of the Prince of Wales followed very soon after that of the Princess Royal. On Lord Mayor’s Day, November 9, 1841, the Queen gave birth to her eldest son. Greville notes with some impatience that the usual formalities were not observed upon this occasion. “From some crotchet of Prince Albert’s,” he writes, “they put off sending intelligence ... till so late that several of the dignitaries whose duty it was to assist at the birth, arrived after the event had occurred, particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord President of the Council.” The Queen probably thought that this was one of the customs more honored in the breach than in the observance, and in this the majority of her subjects would agree with her. The Queen’s Diary records that on November 21, 1841, the Princess Royal’s first birthday, “Albert brought in dearest little Pussy (the Princess Royal) ... and placed her on my bed, seating himself next her, and she was very dear and good. And as my precious invaluable Albert sat there, and our little love between us, I felt quite moved with happiness and gratitude to God.” At Christmas time in this year the Queen’s entry is: “To think that we have two children now, and one who enjoys the sight” (of the Christmas-trees) “already, is like a dream.” And the Prince, writing to his father on the same occasion, says: “To-day I have two children of my own to give presents to, who, they know not why, are full of happy wonder at the German Christmas-tree and its radiant candles.”
It has been already noted how and why Stockmar urged the selection of the King of Prussia as one of the godfathers of the Prince of Wales, and that the King of Hanover was furious at being passed over. He did not easily forget it when he considered himself slighted, and when the Queen, very magnanimously, invited him to be godfather to Princess Alice in 1843, he vindicated his dignity by arriving too late for the christening. He further endeavored to balance the account between his niece and himself by being rude to her husband. Greville says that one day at Buckingham Palace he proposed to Prince Albert to take a walk with him in the streets. It has already been mentioned why the Prince never went anywhere unattended, and the same reason rendered it undesirable that he should be unaccompanied except by the King of Hanover. He therefore excused himself, saying they would be inconvenienced by the crowd of people. The King replied, “Oh, never mind that. I was still more unpopular than you are now, and I used to walk about the streets with perfect impunity.” This little pleasantry was pointed by the fact that a feeling of antagonism against Prince Albert was growing up in certain sections of the community, which a few years later reached quite serious dimensions.
It may be mentioned here that the Queen has all through her life shown herself remarkably free from feeling implacable resentment even against those whose conduct she has at various times most strongly condemned, or against whom she may have been prejudiced. This characteristic, which will be illustrated later by her relations with Lord Palmerston, Lord Beaconsfield, Louis Philippe, and others, was demonstrated now by her magnanimity to her uncle Ernest, King of Hanover. He had plotted against her; had made things uncomfortable for her mother and herself before her accession; had refused, what she particularly valued, to yield precedence to her husband; had, in a dog-in-the-manger spirit, declined, after he became King of Hanover, to give up apartments in St. James’s Palace which were wanted for the Duchess of Kent; in short, had lost no opportunity of showing himself unfriendly and disagreeable; yet when her third child was born, Princess Alice, on April 25th, 1843, she invited this uncle, who was a personification of the wicked uncle of fairy tales, to be the new baby’s godfather.
In 1844, very soon after the birth of a fourth child, Prince Alfred, now Duke of Coburg, the Queen and Prince paid a visit to Scotland, taking the Princess Royal with them. After this the Royal visits to various parts of the kingdom were rendered doubly interesting to the Queen’s subjects by the presence of one or more of the blooming group of the rapidly growing family of children. The Prince wrote to his stepmother of this visit to Scotland: “Pussy’s cheeks are on the point of bursting, they have grown so red and plump; she is learning Gaelic, but makes wild work with the names of the mountains.”
The Dowager Lady Lyttelton was appointed governess to the Royal children. One of her letters to her own daughter, dated 1844, begins, “Dearest mine daughter, as the Prince of Wales would say.” On the third visit to Scotland, in 1847, the two elder children accompanied their parents. The Queen says, in “Leaves from a Journal in the Highlands,” “the children enjoy everything extremely, and bear the novelty and excitement wonderfully well.” On this occasion the Royal party visited the Duke and Duchess of Argyll at Inverary, and the Queen writes, describing their reception, “Outside stood the Marquis of Lome, just two years old, a dear, white, fat, fair little fellow with reddish hair, but very delicate features, like both his father and mother; he is such a merry, independent child.” This was the Queen’s first sight of her future son-in-law.
On Her Majesty’s first visit to Ireland,[19] in 1849, she took her four eldest children with her (many of us wish she had gone before and gone oftener). She received an intensely enthusiastic welcome. The sight of the Royal squadron entering the magnificent harbor at Kingstown, and the loyalty of the reception of the Queen on landing, made a deep impression. The Times said:—
“It was a sight never to be forgotten,—a sound to be recollected forever. Ladies threw aside the old formula of waving a white pocket-handkerchief, and cheered for their lives, while the men, pressing in so closely as to throng the very edges of the pavilion, waved whatever came first to hand,—hat, stick, wand, or coat,—and rent the air with shouts of joy which never ceased in energy till their Sovereign was out of sight.... The Royal children were objects of universal attention and admiration. ‘Oh, Queen, dear!’ screamed a stout old lady, ‘make one of them Prince Patrick, and all Ireland will die for you.’”
Almost every one has a sovereign remedy for Irish disaffection; but few are so easy of application as this. The Queen adopted the old lady’s suggestion; the child born next after the Irish visit, on the Duke of Wellington’s birthday, May 1st, 1850, was named Arthur after that great Irishman, and Patrick after Ireland’s patron saint; the Irish associations of his name were kept up by his taking the title of Duke of Connaught when he reached man’s estate.
Between the birth of her second and third sons, the Queen had had two more daughters, the Princesses Helena and Louise (now Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and Marchioness of Lorne), born respectively on May 25th, 1846, and March 18th, 1848. The name selected for the elder of these two new daughters had a double significance. She was named Helena, not only after her godmother, the Duchess of Orleans, but also to remind English people of what they sometimes forget, that the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, through whom the Roman Empire was brought over to Christianity, was a British princess, daughter of Coel, King of Camalodaum (now Colchester). Prior to the birth of Princess Louise, the Queen had gone through a time of very serious anxiety in regard to political affairs. The revolutionary movement of 1848 was at its height, and though England passed through it safely, yet no one could know at the time that it would do so, and especially that the Chartist movement would not develop in the direction of revolutionary violence. In the early months of this year the Queen had made ready all the rooms at Windsor to receive the fugitive Royal Family of France, who arrived one after another in so forlorn a condition that Her Majesty had to clothe as well as shelter them. The Prince’s step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, who had been almost a mother to him in his childhood, died just at this time. On every side there appeared trouble and misfortune in both public and private affairs. The Prince wrote on February 29th:—