V
Two Queens Regnant, Queen Mary and Queen Anne, both of Stewart blood, lived much at Kensington Palace, and both died there. As a place of residence it had no attractions for the Sovereigns of the House of Hanover. Queen Victoria was fond of the old wing in which her youth had been spent, and which was subsequently occupied for many years by the Duchess of Teck and her children. Built on piles, those portions of the Palace that were uninhabited, and therefore indifferently looked after, had towards the end of the Queen’s reign fallen into such disrepair that their demolition had been decided by the Treasury. The Queen disliked intensely the idea of removing any part of the old building. Ultimately a bargain was made with the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day. It involved a certain exchange of houses in the gift of the Crown and some shifting of financial responsibility. Kensington Palace was saved, and a considerable sum was voted by Parliament for its restoration, on condition that the public should be admitted to certain rooms of historic interest.
King George’s dream, and no one knows better its visionary character, is to pull down Buckingham Palace, to round off St. James’s and the Green Parks at Constitution Hill and Buckingham Gate, and then, with the money obtained by the sale of the Gardens of Buckingham Palace, to reconstruct Kensington Palace as the town residence of the Sovereign.
For Queen Mary the place is full of memories and, because of her keen historic sense, full of interest.
Compared with most of the great European capitals, London is poor in palaces. The homes of the Tudor Sovereigns in and near the metropolis, Nonsuch, Greenwich, and Whitehall, have disappeared. London contains no single palace residentially associated with our long line of Sovereigns. The Court of St. James was housed, in the eighteenth century, in the Palace of that name. It seems to have been adequate for the needs of the Hanoverian Princes, who had none of the amplitude of the Tudors or the fine taste of the Stewarts.
The memories of Windsor, however, are long memories. Although Queen Victoria never liked Windsor, perhaps because she was never in good health there, it is with Windsor Castle that the principal events of her reign are associated. The thoughts of the few, the very few, comparatively speaking, of her subjects who were admitted to the seclusion of Court life during two-thirds of the Queen’s reign may carry them back to quiet days at Balmoral or Osborne, but it was round Windsor that the political interest of the Victorian era centred. There the links of the chain have remained unsevered between the Sovereigns of Great Britain to-day and their Plantagenet ancestors.
If the Queen’s attachment to Windsor was not deep, she was more indifferent still to Buckingham Palace. There is not a word in her Diaries or correspondence to show that she in any way looked upon it as a home or even a residence in any degree interesting or attractive. No attempt was made, after the death of the Prince Consort, to improve or beautify it. The magnificent objects of art and the splendid collection of pictures were badly displayed and quite unappreciated. Few, outside the circle of the Court, knew of their existence. The Palace was judged by its mean façade, and the nation was rather shamefaced about the home of its Sovereign, and certainly took no credit for the really noble rooms and their contents which Buckingham Palace contains.
Yet, through the picture-gallery of this Palace hung with masterpieces of the Dutch School, through the throne-room and the drawing-room resplendent with the royal portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough, or through the matchless corridor at Windsor, have passed nearly all the great figures of the nineteenth century, practically the whole of which was spanned by the life of the Queen.
It is an imposing array, worthy of its setting. Heroes and statesmen, men of science and letters, artists and scholars, all moved, with a feeling of awe, into the presence of the Queen whose girlhood is recounted by herself in these pages.
To those accustomed to the easier manners of more recent times it is difficult to convey a sense of the atmosphere of Windsor during the reign of the Queen. Her extraordinary aloofness was its determining cause, but the effect was that of a shrine. Grave men walked softly through the rooms of the Castle, and no voice was ever raised. The presence of the Sovereign brooded, so to speak, over the Palace and its environment. The desire to be negligently at ease never entered the mind. The air was rarefied by a feeling that somewhere, in a region unvisited by any but the most highly privileged, was seated, not in an ordinary arm-chair, but on a throne, the awe-inspiring and ever-dignified figure of the Sovereign. The proud intellect of Gladstone and the rugged self-sufficiency of Bright bent before the small, homely figure in widow’s weeds. In spite of this homeliness of appearance, notwithstanding her love of simplicity and her dislike of tawdriness and display, her spirit never put aside the regal habit. How rarely the Queen extended her hand! It was a great privilege, and only on special occasions vouchsafed to her Ministers. Men and women bent very low to kiss that hand. This was not due to her small stature, but to the curious, indefinable awe that she undoubtedly inspired during the later portion of her life in all who approached her. Will the reader find, in these records of her girlhood, intimations of that moral ascendency she afterwards acquired over her subjects?