Her Majesty drove quietly about in a pony carriage with perhaps the ever faithful John Brown in attendance to lay a shawl about her shoulders or take one off, as he judged best. You might see him do as much as that in the publicity of Hyde Park in London. It was partly in the simplicity of this Highland life that the Queen found repose. Her Majesty would sometimes stop at Invercauld House for tea, apparently as one neighbour appealing to the hospitality of another. But I imagine these impulses were announced beforehand and that the list of guests at Invercauld was known at Balmoral. During one week there was among them a lady who, for purely technical reasons, was never received at Court though she went almost everywhere else in London and had, and has, a position almost unique. But so long as this lady remained at Invercauld House the Queen found herself too much occupied with business of State to come to tea.
Royalty knows, or knows about, almost everybody. The late King was always the best informed man in his dominions. It was rare that he met a man or woman whose face and history were not familiar to him. He did once at Dunrobin Castle. This was not many years ago, when the King and Queen were circumnavigating this island-part of their Empire in the royal yacht. The yacht anchored for some days in the bay off the castle. The King or Queen, or both, came ashore during the day and returned to sleep on board. As the King, the Duke of Sutherland, and Captain Hedworth Lambton, commander of the yacht, were walking up from the pier through the gardens to the castle, a man passed them. "Who is that?" asked the King. The Duke had to admit he could not tell. "Oh, sir," said Captain Lambton, "don't you know the castle is full of people whom the Duke doesn't know and the Duchess never sees?" The King took this pleasantry as it was meant; aware that there was beneath it just that evanescent adumbration of fact which made it plausible.
Captain Lambton, then the Hon. Hedworth Lambton, brother to the present Earl of Durham, is now Admiral the Hon. Sir Hedworth Lambton, K.C.B., the youngest man of his rank in the service; or was when he was made admiral. Noted for the quaint felicity of his sayings, sometimes with an edge to them; noted for his service with the Naval Brigade in South Africa and the relief of Ladysmith; noted as a skilful seaman who had commanded the cruiser division of the Mediterranean fleet and afterward the China squadron. The Lambtons are a family apart, and Sir Hedworth is a man apart, even amid his own family. There are few men who give you a stronger impression of having made their own that rule of life which consists in taking things as they come. Struggling through the watercourses of the veldt with his 4.10 gun, or on the quarter-deck of the royal yacht in harbour with only duties of ceremony to perform, he is the same man.
He came to Dalmeny House for the week-end while the Victoria and Albert was lying at Queensferry. On the Sunday morning he asked Lord Rosebery and his house-party to go with him to the yacht for morning service. We drove through the charming park to the Leuchold Gate and so to Queensferry pier, whence a launch took us on board. The yacht has a displacement of something more than five thousand tons. Those external lines of beauty which you expect in a yacht had been omitted by the Admiralty designers responsible for this vessel, but once on board everything is admirable. The ship was lying in the Forth, above the bridge, waiting for Queen Alexandra to embark for Copenhagen. Nothing could be smarter than the decks and the crew except the officers; all in full uniform.
It was August, and though some Americans say the sun never shines on these islands, there are moments of exception and this was one. It was burning hot. Captain Lambton read the service, his officers and guests about him, the men in front, all amidships on the upper deck. He came to the Lord's Prayer, the sailors all kneeling and all caps off. In the very middle of it, without a change of intonation or accent, he said to his men: "If anybody feels the sun they may put their caps on." I suppose a super-devout churchman might have been shocked, but the reader was captain of the ship and he had no idea of allowing one of his men to have a touch of sunstroke. It appears they were in no danger for not one of them put on his cap. Nor did any one seem to think his captain's interlocutory sentence out of place. I have seen often enough both in the navy and in the army that the most rigid disciplinarian may be of all others the most careful of his men's health and comfort.
In these Dreadnought days nothing of the pre-Dreadnought period counts. But I was once on I believe, the first Dreadnought, of a type long since antiquated, with a low freeboard forward and the whole expanse of the forecastle deck so arranged as to be, with reference to the rest of the vessel, a lever on which the Atlantic might pile itself up. I asked the captain what might happen in a heavy head sea. "The chances are," he answered coolly, "she would go down head foremost." However, at the moment she was comfortably anchored off Queensferry.
That danger exists no longer for the model is obsolete, and this particular ship no doubt went long since to the scrap heap. But the unsolved problems of naval warfare are still numerous. A fighting admiral in the British navy will tell you strange things if he happens to be in a talkative mood. Nothing is better worth listening to than the discourse of a man who has command of a great fleet or of a great ship, whether of war or commerce. I quote one sentence:
"You want to know what is likely to happen when two modern battle fleets meet at sea, equal in fighting strength and under equal conditions. No man knows. It has never yet happened. But the chances are both would go to the bottom."
Out of many Highland incidents I choose one, for brevity's sake.