This description of Charles Greville’s, whose pen was given to anything but flattery, is confirmed by the testimony of many others present. Earl Grey wrote to Princess Lieven: “When called upon for the first time to appear before the Privy Council, and to take upon herself the awful duties with which at so early an age she has been so suddenly charged, there was in her appearance and demeanour a composure, a propriety, an aplomb, which were quite extraordinary. She never was in the least degree confused, embarrassed or hurried; read the declaration beautifully; went through the forms of business as if she had been accustomed to them all her life.” Lord Palmerston says in a letter to Lord Granville: “The Queen went through her task with great dignity and self-possession; one saw she felt much inward emotion, but it was fully controlled. Her articulation was particularly good, her voice remarkably pleasing.”
Next day, the 21st of June, at ten o’clock in the morning, Her Majesty was formally proclaimed Queen of Great Britain and Ireland at St. James’s Palace, when a salute was fired in the Park, and she appeared at the window of the Presence Chamber, returning afterwards to Kensington Palace. On the 13th of July the Queen, accompanied by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, took her final departure from the place of her birth and the home of her childhood.
INCE the accession of the Queen, Kensington Palace has had a quiet and uneventful history—though Her Majesty has frequently, in the course of her reign, privately revisited her old home, where the Duchess of Kent retained her rooms until her death in 1861; and where, soon after that date, Princess Mary and the Duke of Teck also came to reside for a period. Here their daughter, Princess May, now the Duchess of York, was born in the State Room called “the Nursery,” in 1867.
In the meanwhile, the apartments in the south-west corner of the Palace, occupied by the Duke of Sussex until his death in 1843, were afterwards tenanted by his widow, the Duchess of Inverness, who died in 1873, when they were granted by the Queen to Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne, who still reside in them.
During all these sixty years the Palace had been suffered gradually more and more to fall into a deplorable state of disrepair. The walls were bulging in many places, and merely remained standing by being shored up; the rafters of the roof were beginning to rot away, tiles and slates were broken and slipping off, so that it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the rain and wind at bay. The floors, also, were everywhere deteriorating, the old panelled walls and painted ceilings of the grand reception rooms slowly, but surely, crumbling to decay.
“More than once,” said a leading article in “The Times” of January 12th, 1898, “it has been seriously proposed to pull the whole building down, and to deal otherwise with the land, and Her Majesty’s subjects ought to be grateful to her for having strenuously resisted such an act of Vandalism, and for having declared that, while she lived, the palace in which she was born should not be destroyed.”
