CHAPTER XVII.
FOREIGN TRAVEL AND HOME VISITS.
Visit to King Louis Philippe at Eu—A Loyal Corporation—Splendid Reception of the Queen in France—Anecdote of the Queen’s Regard for Prince Albert—Visit of the Czar Nicholas—Home Life in Scotland—Visit to Germany—Illuminations of the Rhine—A Rural Fête at Coburg.
In August, 1843, the Queen and Prince Albert made a yachting excursion round portions of the south coast and the Isle of Wight. Thence they steamed over to Treport, on the French coast, the nearest port to the Chateau d’Eu, a rural residence of Louis Philippe. On the arrival of the Queen and Prince from Windsor at Southampton, they were met at the end of the pier by the Duke of Wellington and other noble and official personages. It rained heavily, and as there was not sufficient covering for the stage intended to run on to the yacht Victoria and Albert, the members of the Corporation, like so many Raleighs, stripped off their red gowns in a moment, and the pathway was covered for Her Majesty’s use, so that Queen Victoria, like Queen Elizabeth, walked dry-footed to her vessel. The undergraduates at Cambridge acted precisely similarly on the occasion of a visit in wet weather by the Queen and Prince to that university in this year.
VISIT TO FRANCE.
The subsequent visit to France was wholly unexpected in England; and it was even said, and with some show of truth, that the Ministers were unaware of the intention. Of course we cannot speak with any certainty, but it seems but too likely that Louis Philippe intrigued to secure the aid, or at least the condonation, of the Queen of England in those astute enterprises which his busy brain was even now concocting, with which the phrases “Pritchard and Tahiti,” and the “Spanish Marriages” will ever remain associated, and which ultimately, and retributively, cost him his throne. Mr. Raikes, who, be it remembered, was the intimate and bosom friend of the Duke of Wellington, then a Minister of England, has at this date the following entry in his Journal, which was published in 1857, and is an acknowledged, and if not absolutely an indisputable, yet a most weighty authority:—
Tuesday, 19th.—Much conversation after dinner about the Queen’s visit to Eu. I said, that the day before I left Paris, Kisseleff, the Russian Minister, scouted the idea of this visit, and betted that it would never take place. Lord Canning remarked, as a singular coincidence, that Brunow, the Russian Minister in London, asserted positively, on the very morning that the Queen embarked at Southampton, that she had no intention of going to Eu. They both spoke, I suppose, as they wished.
This, it may be said, is mere club gossip. Not so what we are about to quote, and which was written under the Duke of Wellington’s roof:—
Saturday, 23rd.—I went down to Walmer Castle, and found the Duke walking with Mr. Arbuthnot on the ramparts, or, as it is called, the platform, which overlooks the sea.... After the company had departed at ten o’clock, I sat up with the Duke and Arbuthnot till twelve o’clock, talking on various topics.... I see that the Government was evidently opposed to the Queen’s visit to Eu. It was a wily intrigue, managed by Louis Philippe, through the intervention of his daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, during her frequent visits to Windsor with King Leopold, and was hailed by him with extreme joy, as the first admission of the King of the Barricades within the pale of legitimate sovereigns. The Duke said, “I was never let into the secret, nor did I believe the report then in circulation, till at last they sent to consult my opinion as to forming a regency during the Queen’s absence. I immediately referred to precedents as the only proper guide. I told them that George I., George II. (George III. never went abroad), and George IV. had all been obliged to appoint councils of regency; that Henry VIII., when he met Francis I. at Ardres, was then master of Calais, as also when he met Charles V. at Gravelines; so that, in these instances, Calais being a part of his dominions, he hardly did more than pass his frontier—not much more than going from one county to the next. Upon this I decided that the Queen could not quit this country without an Act of Regency. But she consulted the crown lawyers, who decided that it was not necessary, as courtiers would do.” I myself (resumes Raikes) did not believe in her going till two days before she went. Peel persisted afterwards that he had told me of it; but I knew I never heard it, and it was not a thing to have escaped me if I had.