Happy queen! happy nation!
With the exception of table d’hôte colonels’ widows, and Polish counts, who, in England as in every other country trodden of man, know all the secrets of all the royal families in the world, and will tell you with a mysterious look: “Oh! the Princess of So-and-So? I know on excellent authority that she had to be married in all haste.” Or: “You know that little baby the Countess of ... had the other day? Dear child! it will never know what it owes to His Royal Highness;” with the exception, as I say, of these worthies, you will never hear anyone in England tell you shady stories about one of the ladies of this court, so pure and strict on the subject of conduct, that it is said the Queen will not suffer a woman separated from her husband to be presented to her, even were she a marchioness or a duchess.
It is by setting the example of a pure life; by allowing her people to govern themselves as they think fit; by sympathising in the joys and sorrows of her humblest subjects; by creating bonds of affection between the cottage and the throne, that this Queen, this model mother, has inspired in her subjects a love that is akin to worship.
The Queen’s daughters are artists. One has exhibited at the Royal Academy; another has published some of her sketches in a monthly magazine. You see them constantly visiting picture galleries and painters’ studios.
Their education has been such as a careful middle-class mother would give to her daughters, and everyone knows that at the Swiss Cottage, at Osborne, the young princesses learned to sew and keep house.
In 1866, Princess Alice, the wife of Prince Louis of Hesse, who in 1877 succeeded to the grand-ducal throne of Hesse-Darmstadt, wrote to her mother, the ruler of the greatest empire in the world: “I have made all the summer out walking dresses, seven in number, with paletots for the girls, not embroidered, but entirely made from beginning to end; likewise the new necessary flannel shawls for the expected. I manage all the nursery accounts and everything myself, which gives me plenty to do, as everything increases, and, on account of the house, we must live very economically for these next years.”
The letters of the Princess Alice, in which the house-mother is seen in every line, were published in German a few years ago. Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein has just given them to the world, in English. The letters reveal in all its beauty the character of this Princess, who lavished the care and tenderness of a heart full of filial love upon her father in his last illness, and exactly seventeen years after, fell a victim to the devotion with which she nursed her husband and children through the terrible malady that was raging at the time throughout the Grand-Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt.
I was one day in Soho Bazaar with two or three English ladies. A few steps from us the Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, accompanied by her husband, was making some purchases. After having chosen what she required: “You will send me these things,” she said to the young person who had served her.
——“To what address?”
——“To Buckingham Palace.”