“The Queen has been up a really high mountain to-day, and has come down quite fresh after many hours.... The Queen is more and more delighted with Balmoral. She makes long expeditions alone with the Prince and gamekeepers, and has never been so independent before.... She went up Loch-na-gar, ... and the same evening entertained all the neighbors at dinner, and was as fresh and merry as if she had done nothing.”
Four years later, Lady Canning wrote again from Balmoral:—
“The Queen is fonder than ever of this place, and the Prince’s shooting improves. The children are as merry as grigs, and I hear the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred, who live under me, singing away out of lesson-time as loud as ever they can.”
Greville gives a description of the Royal Family at Balmoral, which deserves notice, especially as he had seen so much of Kings and Queens, and had no great affection for them; he was summoned to Balmoral for a Council meeting in 1849, before the present house, which is on a larger scale than the old one, was built; he writes:—
“Much as I dislike Courts and all that appertains to them, I am glad to have made this expedition, and to have seen the Queen and Prince in their Highland retreat, where they certainly appear to great advantage. The place is very pretty, the house very small. They live not merely like private gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks,—small house, small rooms, small establishment.[20] There are no soldiers.... They live with the greatest simplicity and ease. The Prince shoots every morning, returns to luncheon, and then they walk and drive. The Queen is running in and out of the house all day long, and often goes about alone, walks into the cottages, and sits down and chats with the old women. I never before was in the society of the Prince, or had any conversation with him.... I was greatly struck with him. I saw at once (what I had always heard) that he is very intelligent and highly cultivated, and, moreover, that he has a thoughtful mind, and thinks of subjects worth thinking about. He seemed very much at his ease, very gay, pleasant, and without the least stiffness or air of dignity.”
He then mentions an excursion in the afternoon in two pony carriages to the Highland gathering at Braemar, and that the evening wound up with a visit from a Highland dancing-master, who gave all the party, except himself and Lord John Russell, lessons in reels.
The Queen’s half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, had been their companion on one of the very early visits of the Royal Family to Scotland. He died in 1856, and this loss was the first heart grief that the Queen had been called upon to endure. She was very tenderly attached to her half-brother and sister. The letters from the latter[21] in the “Prince Consort’s Life” indicate that hers was a noble soul, one of those beautiful natures, strong in love and spiritual insight, who, whether born in the palace or the cottage, are as a sheet-anchor to those who are baffled by the waves of sorrow and suffering.
A rather curious incident in the Queen’s private life may here be mentioned. A perfect stranger to her, Mr. Neale, died in 1852, and left her a legacy of £200,000. Her Majesty, on hearing of this, at once declared that if he had any relatives she would not accept the money; but it appeared that he had none.
The various attacks that have been made on the Queen’s life belong more, perhaps, to her private than to her public life, for they have been the work of half-witted scoundrels rather than of political desperadoes. In Ireland, when a murder is neither political nor agrarian, it is sometimes described as “merely a friendly affair;” and there is an undoubted satisfaction in the fact that the shots fired at the Queen have had no political aim. The first attempt on her life has been already recorded. On the second occasion the Queen again displayed a very remarkable degree of courage, because she drove out alone with the Prince when she knew that very probably she would be the aim of an assassin’s bullet. It was in 1842, on Sunday, May 29, the Queen and Prince were returning from the Chapel Royal, St. James’s, in a carriage along the Mall, when the Prince distinctly saw a man step out from the crowd, present a pistol full at them, and pull the trigger. He was only two paces distant, and the Prince heard the trigger snap, so there was no mistake about it. Fortunately, the weapon missed fire, and at first the Prince thought that no one but himself had seen what had happened. However, the attempt had been seen by two persons in the crowd, a boy and an old gentleman; the old gentleman did nothing, but the boy came the next day, and reported what he had seen at the Palace. The Home Office and the police were communicated with, and there was naturally a good deal of excitement on the part of the Queen and Prince. They at once determined not to shut themselves up, but to take their drive as usual, although they knew that the would-be assassin was at large. The only difference they made in her usual habits was that they went alone, without either a Lady-in-Waiting or a Maid of Honor in the carriage. They took the precaution of giving orders to drive faster than usual, and the Queen always drove fast, and two equerries on horseback accompanied the carriage. Nearly at the end of their drive, between the Green Park and the garden wall of Buckingham Palace, they were shot at again by the same man who had made the attempt the day before. When he fired he was only about five paces off. The shot, the Prince wrote, must have passed under the carriage. The fellow (John Francis) was immediately seized. He was not crazy, but just a thorough scamp, “a little swarthy, ill-looking rascal.” The same evening at dinner the Queen turned to one of her Maids of Honor, who had been rather put out at not being required to attend the Queen on her drive, and said, “I dare say, Georgy, you were surprised at not driving with me this afternoon, but the fact was that as we returned from church yesterday a man presented a pistol at the carriage window, which flashed in the pan, and we were so taken by surprise he had time to escape, so I knew what was hanging over me, and was determined to expose no life but my own.” The Queen’s uncle, Count Mensdorff, was very proud of his niece’s courage, and called her sehr müthig, which pleased her very much, coming, as the compliment did, from a soldier who had seen much service. Greville’s comment on the Queen’s conduct is: “Very brave, but very imprudent.” A couple of months later, in July, 1842, another of these dastardly attempts was made on Her Majesty’s life, this time by a hunchback named Bean. Oxford had been treated as a lunatic, and sent to an asylum; Francis had been found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death; but, at the Queen’s strongly expressed wish, the sentence had been commuted to transportation for life. This leniency had been made public only the day before Bean’s attempt, and the circumstance strengthened Her Majesty’s conviction that an alteration in the law was desirable. Up to this time it was only possible to deal with these outrages either as lunacy or as high treason, for which the penalty was death. After Bean’s attempt a Bill was immediately introduced, and carried, making such offences punishable, as misdemeanors, by transportation, imprisonment, or whipping. The substitution of an unromantic, but certain, punishment, for a dignified, but uncertain one, had the desired effect, and these scoundrelly attacks upon the Queen ceased to be fashionable in the criminal world. Feints at attempted assassination were made in 1849 by an Irish bricklayer, and in 1872 by a lad named O’Connor, who appears to have been a Fenian; but the weapons used by these worthies were not charged except with powder. In 1882 a man named Maclean fired at the Queen as she was entering her carriage at Windsor Station. He was found on trial to be insane. In June, 1850, she was struck on the face with a cane by a man named Pate, who had been a lieutenant in the army. The Prince Consort said this man was “manifestly deranged.” The chivalrous nature of Peel was strongly moved by the attacks of Francis and Bean, which took place while he was Prime Minister. After Bean’s attempt he hurried up to town to see the Prince, and consult with him on what ought to be done. While he was in conversation with the Prince the Queen entered the room, and Peel’s emotion was so great that his habitual self-control left him, and he burst into tears. When it is remembered that only a few months earlier Greville had said, “Peel is so shy he makes the Queen shy,” it is impossible not to surmise that this touch of nature may have brought about the final breaking down of reserve and coldness between the Queen and her Prime Minister.
In various memoirs of the time, little pictures are given of “the Queen at Sea.” She is a good sailor, and thoroughly enjoys the element over which Britannia rules. She likes sailors, and understands them. Greville tells that nothing could be more easy and agreeable than her demeanor on board her Royal yacht, “conversing all the time with perfect ease and good humor, and on all subjects, taking great interest, and very curious about everything in the ship, dining on deck in the midst of the sailors, making them dance, talking to the boatswain, and, in short, doing everything that was popular and ingratiating.” He complains, however, that she was impatient, and always wanted to be going ahead, and to do everything quickly; whereas the genuine sailor has an unfathomable capacity for loafing. Lady Bloomfield, when Miss Georgina Liddell, attended the Queen as one of her Maids of Honor on a yachting cruise in 1843. She narrates how the Queen and her ladies settled themselves for reading and work in a very comfortable and sheltered place on deck, when they became aware that the position they had taken up was the subject of something like consternation to the captain and crew. The Queen laughingly inquired if there was about to be a mutiny? The captain in the same spirit replied that he could be answerable for nothing unless Her Majesty would be graciously pleased to change her seat. The chairs of the ladies were blockading the grog cupboard! As soon as the Queen was informed of this, she consented to move her chair, on condition that she was to share the sailors’ grog. On tasting it she said, “I am afraid I can only make the same remark I did once before, that I think it would be very good if it were stronger!” The hint was taken, and the sailors were of course delighted by the Queen’s good-nature.