Our concern, however, is not with Elizabeth but with Victoria, with the England into which she was born, and with the influences which helped to give her character and bearing a certain strength and dignity, and attuned her heart, not perhaps to deep tenderness, but to much compassion.
The pen recoils from an attempt to tell again the story of Princess Victoria’s birth and early life, or to describe once more the political events of her first years upon the Throne. Moreover, these volumes tell their own tale. They set forth in the young Princess’s own artless words the daily facts of her existence at Kensington, or when making some provincial royal progress in the company of her mother.
The reader can catch many a glimpse here and there of the soul of a Princess, proud and headstrong, affectionate and sometimes perverse, seated on the lonely heights of the Throne. The portrait is here, within these pages. It is not unskilfully drawn, when the youth of the artist is borne in mind. At the time when the first entries in these Journals were made, the writer was thirteen years old. The last page was written on the day of her marriage. She had been two years a Queen, and she was in her twenty-first year.
Princess Victoria, the only child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and the ultimate heiress in direct succession of George III., was born on May 24, 1819. In 1819 the aspect of English country life was not very different from that of to-day; if the roads were not so well surfaced, and if woodlands were rather more plentiful, the fields and hedgerows, the farmsteads with cottages grouped around them, the Tudor manor-houses, the Georgian villas, the church spires, and the village greens have remained unchanged. Except for lines of railway and telegraph poles, the hop-fields of Kent and the Surrey commons have kept their shape and contours. So that, in spite of the miracles wrought by machinery in the minutiæ of life, any one of our grandparents cruising in an airship at an elevation of some hundreds of feet over the lands where he hunted and shot, or even the great town in which he spent his summer months, would probably be unconscious of much distinctive change.
Young people, however, think it odd when they read that when Princess Victoria was taken from Kensington to Claremont—a journey now accomplished with as little thought as would then have been given to a drive between the Palace and Hyde Park—it was considered a “family removal” of such moment as to require all the provision and precautions associated to-day with an autumn holiday.
To those still young, but old enough to remember Queen Victoria, it may seem hardly credible that she was born into a world devoid of all the marvels of steam and electric contrivance that appear to us the necessities, and not merely the luxuries, of life. How much more difficult it must be for them to realise that when the young Princess (whom they remember a great and mysterious figure, welcoming back only the other day her soldiers from South Africa, and rejoicing in their victories) was carried into the saloon of Kensington Palace to be received by Archbishop Manners Sutton into the Church of Christ, the mighty spirit of Napoleon brooded still behind the palisades of Longwood, and George III.’s white and weary head could still be seen at the window of his library at Windsor!
The Victorian era covers the period of the expansion of England into the British Empire. The soldier, still young to-day, who put the coping-stone on the Empire in Africa in 1900 is linked by the life of the Queen to his forbears, who, when she was born, were still nursing the wounds gloriously earned four years before in laying its foundation in a Belgian cornfield.
That year 1819, however, was a year of deep despondency in England. In Europe it was the “glorious year of Metternich,” then at the height of his maleficent power. Europe was quit of Napoleon, but had got Metternich in exchange, and was ill pleased with the bargain. Great Britain, it is true, was free, but our people were overwrought by poverty and suffering. The storm-swell of the great Napoleonic wars still disturbed the surface of English life, and few realised that they were better off than they had been during the past decade.
At Holland House, its coteries thinner but still talking, Lady Holland—old Madagascar—was still debating what inscription should record the merits of Mr. Fox upon his monument in the Abbey for the edification of future ages. In St. James’s Place Sam Rogers’s breakfasts had not lost their vogue. Tommy Moore was still dining with Horace Twiss, and meeting Kean, and Mrs. Siddons, “cold and queenlike,” on her way to view Caroline of Brunswick’s “things” shortly to be sold at Christie’s, or to criticise Miss O’Neill’s dress rehearsals. On the very day that Princess Victoria was born, Byron was writing to John Murray from Venice “in the agonies of a sirocco,” and clamouring for the proofs of the first canto of Don Juan. In that year Ivanhoe was finished, and in the hands of eager readers; whilst Scott was receiving at Abbotsford a certain Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, uncle of the baby at Kensington, destined thereafter to play a large part in her early life. Keats had just published Endymion. It was his last year in England before going south to die. And it was Shelley’s annus mirabilis: the year in which he wrote Prometheus and The Cenci—an achievement, some have since said, unparalleled in English poetry since Shakespeare lived and wrote.
The Excursion had been published five years before, but Wordsworth was at Rydal Mount completing The White Doe of Rylston. Southey was Poet Laureate. Three years before, in the “wild and desolate neighbourhood amid great tracts of bleak land enclosed by stone dykes sweeping up Clayton heights,” Charlotte Brontë’s eyes had opened upon her sad world. Carlyle, then a young teacher in Edinburgh, was passing through that stormy period of the soul which comes sooner or later to every one whose manhood is worth testing by God. And half-way between Horncastle and Spilsby, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold, Alfred Tennyson was reading Pope’s Iliad and himself “writing an epic of 6,000 lines à la Walter Scott.” At Shrewsbury School under Dr. Butler, Charles Darwin, then a boy of ten, had already begun to develop a taste for “collecting,” manifested in “franks” and seals and coins. Robert Browning, a turbulent and destructive child of seven, had already commenced making rhymes less complicated, but not less ambitious, than those which puzzled his readers sixty years later. Goethe, who had grown to manhood within earshot of Frederick the Great and of the Empress Maria Theresa, was living at Weimar with many years of life still before him, corresponding with the boy Mendelssohn, later to be a welcome guest, at Windsor, of the little Princess, then in her cradle in Kensington Palace. Mazzini, aged fourteen, was at the University in Genoa, a rebellious lad, but already affecting the deep mourning dress he never altered later in life. Cavour, aged nine, was at school in Turin. Sir Thomas Lawrence was in that year engaged in finishing his magnificent series of historical portraits afterwards to find a home at Windsor Castle, illustrating for all time the Congress of Vienna and the story of the Great Coalition against Napoleon.