The Queen’s speech of this year noticed with deep regret the continued distress in the manufacturing districts of the country, and bore testimony to the exemplary patience and fortitude with which it had been borne. Many people began once more to murmur at the continued flow of gaiety at Windsor where the young parents still seemed to experience the first thrills of transport at the birth of a son and heir. Some of the lowest class of seditious newspapers began the practice of printing in parallel columns the description of the fancy dresses at the Queen’s balls (the purchase and preparation of which must certainly have tended to alleviate the distress), &c., and reports from the pauperised districts, records of deaths from starvation, and the like. Among the unthinking classes such disloyal practices produced a very deep feeling of dissatisfaction. In the course of the year two attempts were reported as having been made upon the Queen’s life: one, however, being merely the freak of an ill-natured boy, but the other was of a much more serious description, and cost its author transportation for life. Sir Robert Peel felt it his duty to discharge the part of a faithful Minister, and to counsel his Royal mistress to lessen the gaieties of the Court, even if it were only in deference to the prejudices of the starving and maddened poor. He neither roused nor augmented her fears, but gave her the counsel which the time required. The Queen at once acted, and without taking offence, upon the Minister’s advice. At the christening of the Prince of Wales all the ladies of the Court appeared in Paisley shawls, English lace, and other articles of home manufacture. And when the christening was over a marked sobriety settled down over the Court, and continued during all the summer of 1842. Even the most querulous speedily granted that they had no reason to complain.
This change in the sentiments of the public, especially its lower and more distressed portions, was promoted and accelerated by an act, equally tasteful and touching, of Her Majesty during this year. In the spring of 1842, Sir Robert Peel, now thoroughly warm in his seat as Premier, commanding a large working majority, and not yet having awakened the hostility of the decidedly Protectionist section of his followers, inaugurated that splendid series of bravely devised measures in the direction of Free Trade, of which the great Anti-Corn Law Act of four years later was, so far as he was concerned, the culmination. In 1842, Peel proposed and carried a Budget which considerably lessened the burden of Customs imposts, but the chief merit and recommendation of which consisted in the fact that it relieved the nation of the incubus of a host of very galling excise duties on such articles of common use as glass, leather, bricks, and soap. These beneficial remissions of taxation could not have been effected by him—for they entailed a heavy cost upon the revenue, already inadequate to meet the annual expenditure—but for the re-imposition of an Income Tax, a means of raising revenue which had been long disused, to the extent of sevenpence in the pound on all incomes above £150 of annual value. This, of course, did not affect the allowance made to the Sovereign. Nevertheless, Her Majesty evinced her sympathy at once with the prevailing distress and with the daring fiscal expedient of the Premier, by coming forward unsolicited to offer to receive an abatement of her income, based upon the precise scale of that imposed by Parliament upon her subjects.
Up to the Queen’s reign, the members of the House of Brunswick had never been peripatetic in their tendencies. The first two Georges had made frequent visits to their patrimonial German electorate, but they evinced no desire to visit England beyond the immediate environs of London. George III. never passed out of England; George IV. visited Ireland and Scotland each on one occasion; but with these exceptions, hardly any British highways were traversed by his wheels during his reign, whether as Sovereign Regent or Regnant, except the great roads connecting his capital with Windsor, Brighton, and Newmarket. William IV. was too old when he came to the throne to make it at all probable that he would evince any taste to visit any of the outlying portions of his dominions; nor did he do so. Queen Victoria, as we have copiously seen in earlier chapters, was from her very infancy habituated to moving about from place to place, and all along she has proved herself as proud as Queen Elizabeth herself of mingling with and showing herself to her people.
FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND.
For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they, and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh.
The expected visit was awaited and prepared for in the North with the utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations, burgher vied with noble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a fine coup-d’œil of romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their illustrious visitors with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though of English birth, was chaunted right lustily by Scottish lungs and lips. It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan.
LANDING ON SCOTTISH SOIL.
As she passed up the Firth, under cover of the gathering night, every peak on either side of the estuary, from St. Abb’s Head, which she had left behind, away westwards to the Pentlands, the Lomonds, and the Ochils, was surmounted by a blazing beacon—a splendid sight, and stimulative by contrast to the imaginations of those who recollected to what different uses beacon-fires on Scottish hills and Scottish Border Keeps had been put in earlier days of the international relations of England and Scotland. The fiery welcome was returned from the Royal yacht, by the letting off of rockets, and the burning of blue lights.
At last the squadron came in sight in the roads before Leith, the anchor being let down—“a welcome sound,” wrote the Queen—at a quarter to one o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September the 1st. Every one of the heights on or under the domination of which Edinburgh stands, had been crowded all the previous day with tens of thousands of spectators. All at once two guns from the castle, and a signal flag hoisted from the summit of Nelson’s column, some 400 feet above the level of the sea, announced the arrival. The Queen slept and rested herself after the fatigues of her voyage on board the Royal yacht; and she took her good but inalert subjects by surprise, by effecting her landing at an hour so early on the succeeding morning, that many of them, wearied by their recent vigils, had not yet left their couches, and even the corporate dignitaries were subject to the mortification of not having the honour to receive and welcome their Queen as her foot first touched Scottish soil. In their absence, that pleasurable duty was discharged by Sir Robert Peel, and the Duke of Buccleuch, whose guest she was about to be at his palace of Dalkeith, and who had ridden immediately after her carriage, as Captain-General of her body-guard of Scottish Archers, on the day on which she was crowned queen at Westminster. Sir Robert Peel told the Queen that the people were all in the highest glee and good humour, though a little disappointed at the non-arrival of the squadron the day before, as had been expected.
With the extraordinarily auspicious fatality which has made “Queen’s weather” so trite and proverbial an expression, the sun splendidly burst forth at the moment of her landing, and continued to shine throughout her progress through a portion of the New Town of Edinburgh; its bright freestone streets and terraces sparkling in the clear, sunlit air—past her ancient Palace of Holyrood, and so through fertile Lothian to the mansion of the princely head of the old Border House of the Scotts. When the customary ensign was hauled down from the top of the rugged Castle Rock, and the Royal Standard was hoisted in its place, the streets at once filled, and the loyal shouts of the crowds, who hastily assembled in no small force, sufficiently atoned for the absence of those whom the somewhat unexpected arrival balked for this one day of the delight of expressing their devotion.