One more little home touch must conclude this chapter. Reference has already been made to the Queen’s reluctance to part from the Prince even for a few days. When it was necessary for him to leave her, he kept her constantly supplied with diary-letters, showing that his thoughts and heart were ever with her. On one of these absences, occasioned by the death of his father, the Duke of Coburg, in 1844, Prince Albert was away a fortnight. His own entry in his journal thus records his return: “Crossed on the 11th. I arrived at six o’clock in the evening at Windsor. Great joy.”
[20] The new house at Balmoral was not finished till 1855.
[21] The Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe.
CHAPTER XI.
FORTY-THREE TO FORTY-EIGHT.
The Queen’s first visit to a foreign country took place in September, 1843, when she and the Prince visited Louis Philippe and his family at Château d’Eu, near Tréport. It was not only the Queen’s first visit to France, but the first time since the Field of the Cloth of Gold that an English reigning sovereign had been in France; and even then the meeting of the two sovereigns had taken place on English territory near Calais. The Queen was enchanted with everything she saw. She had to the full all the keen and vivid interest which is almost invariably awakened by seeing for the first time all those innumerable little differences in every-day things which make a first foreign visit such a revelation. If she was delighted with France, she was no less so with her hosts, the King of the French and his family. She had been for six years Queen of England, and it was, perhaps, a refreshment to her to associate with those who were not her subjects, but her equals. She wrote in her journal, “I feel so gay and happy with these dear people.” Louis Philippe, on his part, was extremely anxious to make her visit agreeable to her. He highly appreciated the honor she was conferring on him. The representatives of the ancient monarchies of Europe did not view him with any cordiality. He was not king by divine right, but by the choice of the French people; the rightful King of France, in the view of the Emperors of Russia and Austria, was the exiled Comte de Chambord, Henry V. as they called him. Hence Louis Philippe cordially welcomed the social prestige which he gained by receiving a visit from the Queen of England. The King expressed his obligations on this score to Prince Albert over and over again.
The Earl of Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary of the day, accompanied the Queen and Prince to France. The English Foreign Office at this time regarded with apprehension a scheme which they believed Louis Philippe and his Minister, Guizot, had in view of strengthening French interests in Spain by marrying one of the King’s sons to the young Queen Isabella. Louis Philippe, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit, assured her most positively, and Guizot said the same thing to Aberdeen, that he had no wish or intention of the kind, that even if his son were asked in marriage for the Queen of Spain, he would not consent. The Queen of Spain and her sister the Infanta were then young girls of thirteen and twelve respectively. The French King’s assurances to our Queen went so far as a positive promise that even if one of his sons should eventually marry the Infanta, he should not consent to the union until after the Queen of Spain was married and had children. It is necessary to go at length into the wretched story. Louis Philippe and Guizot covered themselves with infamy. Through their influence a hateful marriage was forced on Queen Isabella, her consent to it being, it is said, wrung from her under the influence of intoxication; from this marriage it was hoped and believed that no children would be born. At the same time that this so-called marriage was announced, it was also made public that the Infanta would be married to the Duc de Montpensier, son of Louis Philippe. The two marriages took place on the same day, October 10th, 1846. Well might Stockmar write of this odious transaction, as “a political intrigue which exceeds in immorality and vulgarity everything brought out in modern times on the theatre of politics; a part which would have shut out any one who had attempted to play it in the circle of private life from all respectable society.”
Our Queen was deeply incensed; her whole soul revolted from the wickedness of the scheme, and she had the added bitterness of feeling that Louis Philippe had been guilty of personal deception towards herself. It was he who introduced the subject when she visited him at Eu, and gave her assurances upon it, unsought by her, and lightly broken by him. His way of announcing the project to her did not mend matters. He was ashamed to broach the subject in a formal manner, and he got his wife to tell the Queen as a detail of family news in a private and friendly letter, speaking of it as if it were of no political importance, but simply an event that would add to the domestic happiness (“le seul vrai dans ce monde,” the poor Queen Marie Amélie was made to say) of the French Royal Family. Our Queen’s reply was exceeding dignified, severe, short, and self-restrained. It left no doubt as to her sentiments; and nothing is more indicative of Louis Philippe’s bad conscience in the matter than the fact, which he himself admits, that he sat up till four in the morning on three following nights composing a reply in which he endeavored in vain to justify himself.[22]
It is of course quite open to doubt whether the English Foreign Office had been justified in regarding with apprehension the possible accession of a grandson of Louis Philippe to the troublous royalty of Spain. Cobden and the school he represented in England did not think it mattered a straw to England, from the political point of view, whom the Queen of Spain married. But the transaction could not be looked at as merely political. It was condemned throughout the length and breadth of England as grossly immoral, and the disgust it occasioned was all the greater on account of the pretensions to high motives and to religious principles assumed by the French King and his Minister.
Events soon confirmed the views of the Queen and Prince, so often inculcated by Stockmar, that sorrow will always be found dogging sin. The Spanish marriages took place in October, 1846: in fifteen months from that time Louis Philippe and the dynasty he hoped to found had been swept away; the little Spanish daughter-in-law whose son he had hoped might wear the crown of Spain was, with other members of his family, fugitive in England, indebted for shelter and even clothing to our Queen, who forgot all her resentment, and gave them a most kind welcome. Nothing came about as Louis Philippe had planned. The Queen of Spain had children; her grandson is now the baby King of Spain, and Louis Philippe’s great-grandson, exiled from France, is addressing futile[23] proclamations from English soil, to assure the French people that when they want him, which they show no sign of doing, he is ready to ascend the throne of his ancestors. It has been remarked that a strange fatality attended on many of the chief actors in the Spanish marriages. The French Minister at Madrid, M. Bresson, committed suicide in 1847. Louis Philippe and his dynasty were overthrown in 1848. Queen Isabella was deposed in 1868. Her son, Alfonso XII., married his cousin Princess Mercedes Montpensier. She died, not without suspicions of poisoning, within a year of her marriage; and he died, while still quite a young man, before the birth of his only son by his second marriage. Before the accession of Alfonso XII., the question of a successor to Queen Isabella was the proximate cause of the French and German War of 1870-71.