[19] The Queen visited Ireland again in 1853 to open the International Exhibition in Dublin; and a third time in 1861, when the Prince of Wales was going through a course of military training at the Curragh.
CHAPTER X.
HOME LIFE.—OSBORNE AND BALMORAL.
It has already been remarked that the Queen throughout her reign has shown herself a thorough woman in being a good domestic economist. It was quite in accordance with this trait in her character that she and the Prince very early in their married life set themselves the almost Herculean task of the reform of the Royal Household. They found it in thorough disorganization, replete with confusion, discomfort, and extravagance. Various branches of the domestic service in the palaces were under the Heads of Government Departments; no one was responsible for the order and good administration of the whole. To give some idea of the prevailing confusion, Stockmar’s memorandum on the subject may be quoted where he points out that the Lord Chamberlain cleans the inside of the windows, and the Wood and Forests the outside. The degree of light admitted to the palace therefore depended on a good understanding between the two. Again, “The Lord Steward finds the fuel and lays the fire, the Lord Chamberlain lights it.... In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them.” If a pane of glass in the scullery had to be replaced, or a broken lock mended, a requisition had to be signed and counter-signed by no fewer than five different officials before the expenditure was finally sanctioned by the Woods and Forests, or the Lord Steward, as the case might be. Some of the servants were under the Lord Chamberlain, some under the Master of the Horse, some under the Lord Steward; as neither the first nor second of these State officials had any permanent representative in the palace, more than two-thirds of the male and female servants were left without any master or mistress at all. They came and went as they pleased, and sometimes remained absent for hours, or were guilty of various irregularities, and there was no one whose duty it was to control them. There was no one official responsible for the cleanliness, order, and security of the palace; and if the dormitories where the footmen slept, ten and twelve in a room, were turned into scenes of riot and drunkenness, no one could help it. So little watch was kept over the various entrances to the palaces, that there was nothing to prevent people from walking in unobserved, and, as a matter of fact, shortly after the birth of the Princess Royal, a boy did walk into Buckingham Palace in this way, and was accidentally discovered at one o’clock in the morning under a sofa in the room adjoining the Queen’s bedroom. The stupidity, disorganization, and wastefulness of the whole thing were boundless; the only redeeming point was that there appeared to be no corruption. Her Majesty might find it impossible to get her dining-room warmed because of a coolness between the Lord Chamberlain’s and the Lord Steward’s departments; but she was not called upon to pay for fuel she had never received, or for services that had been discontinued since the death of Queen Anne. Some idea of the scale in which the housekeeping at Windsor is conducted may be gathered from the fact that in one year (1842), which does not appear to have been in any way exceptional, as many as 113,000 people dined there, so that there was a magnificent scope either for waste or economy. The reform of the Household was carried out on lines suggested by Stockmar, but in a manner thoroughly congenial with English precedent. The three great State officers between whom the control of the Household was shared, were retained, but their duties were delegated to one official, the Master of the Household, who was always to be resident at Court, and who was made responsible for the good government of the Royal establishments. It is easy to mention in three lines that the thing was done, but its actual accomplishment was by no means easy. A good deal of opposition was encountered from the heads of both political parties, as well as from those more directly interested in the abuses of the old system, and the efforts of the Queen and her husband to introduce internal economy and order into their home were not crowned with success short of three years’ continuous effort, between 1841 and 1844.
The advantages of these reforms in household management could not but commend themselves to so good an economist as Sir Robert Peel. In 1844 the Queen had entertained at Windsor, on a scale of becoming magnificence, the Sovereigns of Russia and France; and Peel had the satisfaction of announcing in the House that the Royal visits had not added one farthing to the burdens on the taxpayer. In former times, during the visit, for instance, of the Allied Sovereigns in 1814, the country had to pay for the entertainment of the Royal guests; but this was now changed, and the Queen provided for her Royal and Imperial guests out of the Civil List.
The little glimpse that has been given of life in a palace, where the head of the house finds her housemaids under the Lord Steward, and her pages under the Master of the Horse, enables us to understand some of the satisfaction which the Queen enjoyed when she became possessed of country homes, one in the Isle of Wight, and the other in Scotland, that were entirely her own. When the purchase of Osborne was just accomplished, the Queen wrote (March 25th, 1845) to her uncle at Brussels, “It sounds so pleasant to have a place of one’s own, quiet and retired, and free from all Woods and Forests and other charming departments, which really are the plague of one’s life.”
The purchase of the estate and the building of the house, costing something like £200,000, were met by the Queen without difficulty out of her income, so greatly had her resources been practically increased by good management and wise economy in the administration of the household. In the same spirit the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of the Prince of Wales, were carefully managed for his benefit, so that a very large property from them awaited him as soon as he attained his majority. The Prince Consort’s love for landscape gardening found ample scope both at Osborne and Balmoral. The work was for several years a constant source of recreation and delight to him. Of Osborne in particular, he felt that he could say that the gardens were his creation; there was hardly a tree in the grounds that had not been placed there by him. Lady Canning wrote from Osborne in 1846, in one of her private letters, “You will be pleased to hear of this rural retreat.... Whatever it is, it perfectly enchants the Queen and Prince, and you never saw anything so happy as they are with the five babies playing round about them.” The Royal children had at Osborne a place that was especially their own, a thing that all children love; thousands of country homes all over England have some Noah’s Ark or Pigs’ Paradise, where the boys and girls are masters of the situation, and may carpenter, paint, cook, and cut their hands and burn their fingers without let or hindrance from nurses or governesses. The Royal children at Osborne had their Swiss Cottage. Here the boys had a forge and a carpenter’s bench, or learnt the art of war by making fortifications, and the girls had little gardens and kitchens and rooms for their special games and pastimes; there was also a Natural History museum which was a source of much interest and delight.
There is another feature of the gardens at Osborne which should be mentioned, an immense myrtle-tree which was struck from a sprig of myrtle from the wedding bouquet of the Princess Royal; every Royal bride in the Queen’s family carries a piece of this myrtle with her to the altar on her marriage-day. The Queen has twice sent sprays of this myrtle as far as St. Petersburg, once in 1874, for the bridal bouquet of her daughter-in-law, the Archduchess Marie, now Duchess of Coburg, and once in 1894, for the bouquet of her granddaughter, the Princess Alix of Hesse, now the wife of the Czar of Russia. On the former occasion the myrtle was intrusted to the care of Lady Augusta Stanley, and the Queen gave her special instructions how to revive it in tepid water.
Osborne was a harbor of refuge to which the Queen and Prince could run for a few days’ rest at any time when they felt their strength almost exhausted from the constant pressure of political work and responsibility; but they had an even more dearly loved holiday resort in their home in the Highlands at Balmoral. The Prince was always extremely sensitive to good air, and the smoky atmosphere of towns was peculiarly oppressive to him; he used to exclaim on reaching the pure country air, “Now I can breathe! Now I am happy!” The fine air of Dee-side was life and breath to him. In addition to the benefit to their health, the Royal couple delighted in Scotland for other reasons, the chief of which was that they could enjoy there a degree of freedom to which they were strangers elsewhere. Highland loyalty is compatible with perfectly good manners, and the poor people round Balmoral did not demonstrate their affection for their Sovereign by staring at her as if she were a waxwork show, or dogging her carriage or her footsteps whenever she went beyond her own gates. The Highland servants combined perfect respect with independence of character. The Queen delighted in them, and found real friends in several of them. The Royal family could make little incognito expeditions in Scotland, and stay at small country inns as Lord and Lady Churchill and party, without any danger of being found out; or if they were found out, the people who made the discovery were too well bred to proclaim it, and showed their loyalty by respecting the wishes of their Sovereign to enjoy privacy. In the years before the Prince Consort’s death the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, writing from Scotland, frequently speak of Her Majesty’s high spirits, her love of dancing, and her enjoyment of rapid driving.
Lady Canning wrote in the autumn of 1848 from Balmoral:—