“What dismal times are these.... Augustus, Clementine, Nemours, and the Duchess of Montpensier, have come to us one by one like people shipwrecked. Victoire, Alexander, the King, the Queen, are still tossing on the waves, or have drifted to other shores.... France is in flames; Belgium is menaced. We have a ministerial, money, and tax crisis; and Victoria is on the point of being confined. My heart is heavy.”
It was in this depression that the courageous heart of the loving woman cheered and sustained that of her husband. As soon as she was able to write after the birth of the new baby, she wrote to her uncle Leopold:—
“From the first I heard all that passed; my only thoughts and talk were politics. But I never was calmer, quieter, or less nervous. Great events make me calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.”
The letter in which the Prince announced to Stockmar the birth of Princess Louise contains an expression which invites criticism; he writes: “I have good news for you to-day. Victoria was safely delivered this morning, and though it be a daughter, still my joy and gratitude are very great,” &c. The Prince is only responsible for the sentiment, not for the italics; but why should it be necessary to write in this way of the birth of a daughter even in the dark backward and abysm of time of 1848? Mr. George Meredith writes of one of his heroines that she had never gone through the various nursery exercises in dissimulation, and “had no appearance of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being a woman.” But here we have an even more perverted sentiment than that presented by a woman apologizing for being a woman; it is black ingratitude for one of the best gifts God gives to man when either father or mother begrudges a welcome to a new baby on account of its sex. The Queen, we gather, did not give little girls a grudging welcome to this world; on the birth of her first granddaughter, the Princess Charlotte of Prussia, in 1860, she wrote of the news that “Vicky had a daughter.” “What joy! Children jumping about—every one delighted.” The Prince, too, on this occasion wrote to the Princess Royal of her little daughter, as “a kindly gift from heaven,” and even says, “Little maidens are much prettier than boys. I advise her to model herself on her Aunt Beatrice.”
The birth of Prince Arthur, in 1850, has been already mentioned. He was a magnificent child, and the Queen took all a mother’s pride in his beauty and his rapid growth. When Lady Canning was in waiting she tells us of many private visits by the Queen to her in her room to talk about politics and to show the beauty of the latest new baby; and of Prince Arthur in particular she wrote on September 1st, 1850: “The children ... are grown very nice and pretty. Prince Arthur is a magnificent child, and the Queen is quite enchanted to find he is bigger than the keeper’s child at Balmoral of the same age, whose measurements she carefully brought back. He has the Royal look I have heard grandmamma talk about, which I think she said was so remarkable in the Queen when a baby.”
The two youngest of the Queen’s nine children, Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice, were born respectively on 7th April, 1853, and on 14th April, 1857. The Queen’s letter announcing Prince Leopold’s name to her uncle has already been quoted (see p. 24). She said it would recall the days of her childhood to hear “Prince Leopold” again; among his other names the little Prince was given that of Duncan, in “compliment to dear Scotland.” His delicate constitution was a source of anxiety from very early years. He was the only one of the flock of Royal children whose health was not good. It fell to the happy lot of the Princess Beatrice to be the special pet and plaything of her father during the last years of his life, and also, as we all know, to be the companion and solace of her mother in later years when all her other daughters had married and left her. There are numerous instances in the later volumes of the “Prince Consort’s Life” of his delight in his youngest daughter, “the most amusing baby we have had.” He constantly wrote about her droll ways and sayings to his married daughter in Berlin. Thus in July, 1859, he wrote: “The little aunt makes daily strides, and is really too comical. When she tumbles she calls out in bewilderment, ‘She don’t like it, she don’t like it!’ and she came into breakfast a short time ago (with her eyes full of tears) moaning, ‘Baby has been so naughty, poor baby so naughty,’ as one might complain of being ill, or having slept badly,” &c.
In the seventeen years from 1840 to 1857 the Queen had had nine children, all but one of good physical constitution, all without exception of sound mind, and several very markedly above the average in intellectual vigor and capacity. She herself bore the strain of her confinements without any permanent deterioration of her natural vigor. The entry in the “Prince Consort’s Life” in reference to the Queen’s health after the birth of her children usually is, “The Queen made a rapid recovery, and was able within a few days to report her convalescence to her uncle at Brussels,” or, “The Queen’s recovery was unusually rapid.” Attention is drawn to these facts in order to controvert the view put forward by the late Mr. Withers Moore, Sir James Creighton Browne, and others, that intellectual activity on the part of women is to be discouraged because it is supposed to be incompatible with the satisfactory discharge of the functions of maternity. The Queen throughout the whole of her married life down to the present time, when she has considerably passed the proverbial three-score years and ten of the allotted span of man’s existence, has been immersed in political work, often involving decisions of first-rate importance; she has therefore preserved her vigor of mind and power of work unimpaired; and it is not unfair to conclude that old age has come upon her “frosty but kindly,” partly because she never was satisfied to regard her maternal duties on their physical side only. A cow, a dog, or a lioness has the physical functions and passions of maternity developed in all their beauty and perfection; but a human mother has to aim at being all that animals are to their young, and something more; if not, she is apt to get into the trough of the wave of mere animalism, and in this case her children will find, when they lose their babyhood, they lose their mother too. The Queen has always as a mother set the best example to her subjects in this respect. Her motherhood has been no mere craze of baby worship. She has ever kept in view high aims for her children and grandchildren, encouraging them to accept nobly the responsibilities and duties of their position. In one of Princess Alice’s letters to her mother, written in 1870, she replies to a letter from the Queen upon the bringing up of the little family at Darmstadt; the letter is interesting as throwing a light upon the Queen’s own aims in the education of her children. The Princess writes:—
“What you say about the education of our girls I entirely agree with, and I strive to bring them up totally free from pride of their position, which is nothing save what their personal worth can make it. I read it to the governess, thinking how good it would be for her to hear your opinion.... I feel so entirely as you do on the difference of rank, and how all important it is for princes and princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others, save through their own merit; and that they only have the double duty of living for others and being an example good and modest. This I hope my children will grow up to.”
We are not, however, left to infer from the Princess’s letters what were the Queen’s views on the education of her children; the “Prince Consort’s Life” contains several memoranda written by Her Majesty herself on the subject. One of these, written in 1844, says: “The greatest maxim of all is—that the children should be brought up as simply and in as domestic a way as possible; that (not interfering with their lessons) they should be as much as possible with their parents, and learn to place their greatest confidence in them in all things.” The religious training of the children was given, as much as circumstances admitted, by the Queen herself; it was based on endeavoring to implant in the children a loving trust in God as their Father, avoiding all extreme views, and not entering upon the differences of creed. Her Majesty does not approve of the Athanasian Creed forming part of the Church service, and does not suffer it to be read in her chapels. The Queen’s children were not taught to dwell on the supernatural features of the Christian religion, but rather upon the pure and comprehensive morality which it teaches as its essential and indestructible element; they were taught that the conditions of belief in the former may and did vary in various stages of human development, but that the latter was the bed-rock on which the whole structure was founded.
The Queen and Prince, like other parents, took the keenest and most intense delight in the evidence given from time to time that their children had gifts of mind which would have fitted them to excel in whatever position of life they had been placed. Frequent reference will be found in the following pages to their pride in the remarkable intellectual gifts of the Princess Royal, who was described while still a young girl as having “a statesmanlike mind.” Their boys were trained as carefully as if no royal road to distinction lay open to them. On returning from their first visit to their married daughter in Prussia in 1858, the Queen and Prince were met by the “delightful news that Affie” (Prince Alfred, aged 14) “had passed an excellent examination” (into the Navy) “and had received his appointment.” He met his father and mother at the private pier at Portsmouth “in his middle’s jacket, cap, and dirk, half blushing and looking very happy. He is a little pulled down from these three days’ hard examination, which only terminated to-day.... We felt very proud, as it is a particularly hard examination.”