BIRTH OF THE PRINCESS ROYAL.
On the afternoon of the 21st of November, the country was gladdened by the birth of the Queen’s first-born, the Princess Royal, now Crown Princess of Prussia. The event occurred considerably before the period anticipated by the Queen’s medical and other attendants, and preparations had to be made in a hurry. Nevertheless, the Queen soon regained her accustomed health, and so rapidly that we find it recorded that on the day before that appointed for the christening, she and a lady of the Court, exercising their strength and preserving their presence of mind, rescued the Prince from a most perilous if not fatal position. He had been skating, accompanied only by the Queen and one Lady-in-waiting, and had fallen through the ice in such a position that he could not possibly have extricated himself.
Two days after the Princess was born, Mr. Selwyn, a gentleman with whom Prince Albert was reading English law and constitutional history, came to give his pupil his accustomed lesson. The Prince said to him, “I fear I cannot read any law to-day, there are so many constantly coming to congratulate; but you will like to see the little Princess.” He took his tutor into the nursery, as he found that the child was asleep. Taking her hand, he said, “The next time we read, it must be on the rights and duties of a Princess Royal.”
In 1841 Lord Melbourne was no longer Prime Minister. Sir Robert Peel, who had gained the largest Parliamentary majority which had been known for many years, reigned in his stead. The Queen made no difficulty about the Ladies of the Household now. Her tastes and feelings were consulted with great delicacy and consideration by the Premier, and the selection of the Duchess of Buccleuch in the first instance as Mistress of the Robes, which post may be termed the female Premiership of the Household, was especially gratifying to Her Majesty. But her heart was, nevertheless, loth to part with the constant female companions of the first four years of her reign. Thursday, September the 2nd, was the last evening she spent with them. At the dinner-table she could scarcely trust herself to speak, and she is reported to have shed bitter tears when she retired with her ladies. Everybody pitied the young Sovereign, and saw and felt the hardship involved. But it was an inevitable accompaniment of her high position.
BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES.
The heir to the throne adorned by Queen Victoria was born in the midst of one of the very darkest periods of English history. In 1841 the condition of the people had been declining from the beginning of the year. Operatives were on half time—at last they had no work at all—and the few who had had the means or the will to be provident, were living on their savings. Public meetings were being held to consider what was to be done, and public subscriptions were opened. Then the idle hands commenced to meet in large numbers, with a sullen look of despair, waiting for death or alms—a comparatively small number being employed at the expense of municipal and other recognised bodies, in road making or road mending. Crime, which follows pauperism as surely and almost as rapidly as the obscene vulture pounces upon the carrion which is not yet cold, was rife; murders came in multitudes, poisonings by wholesale; murders by trades unionists, murders by thieves. It was when this dark cloud lowered over England—a cloud never completely dispelled until the rise of the great and glorious Free Trade sun, five years later—that the Prince of Wales first breathed. A London Gazette extraordinary, which appeared on Tuesday evening, November the 9th, ran as follows:—
This morning, at twelve minutes before eleven o’clock, the Queen was happily delivered of a Prince, His Royal Highness Prince Albert, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, several Lords of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and the Ladies of Her Majesty’s Bedchamber, being present.
This great and important news was immediately made known to the town by the firing of the Tower and Park guns; and the Privy Council being assembled as soon as possible thereupon, at the Council Chamber, Whitehall, it was ordered that a Form of Thanksgiving be prepared by His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be used in all churches and chapels throughout England and Wales and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on Sunday, the 14th of November, or the Sunday after the respective ministers shall receive the same.
Her Majesty and the infant Prince are, God be praised, both doing well.