Her courage and strength of mind are most heart-breaking when one thinks of the danger in which she is, and her dear and angelic soul seems even to shine more brightly at this moment of such great and imminent danger. I am in a dreadful state when I am with her. She is so contented, so cheerful, that the possibilities of danger appear to me impossible; but the physicians are very much alarmed, without thinking the state absolutely hopeless. That one should write such things about a life so precious, and one in fact still so young, and whose angelic soul is so strong! You will feel with me as you love her so dearly. God bless you and preserve you from heart-breaking sufferings like mine. Ever, my dearest Victoria, your devoted Uncle,
Leopold R.
Footnote 35: The Queen of the Belgians died on the 11th of October, at the age of thirty-eight.
Viscount Palmerston to Queen Victoria.
GENERAL HAYNAU
Broadlands, 8th October 1850.
Viscount Palmerston presents his humble duty to your Majesty, and has had the honour to receive your Majesty's communication of the 4th instant, expressing your Majesty's wish that an alteration should be made in his answer to Baron Koller's[36] note of the 5th of September, on the subject of the attack made upon General Haynau;[37] but Viscount Palmerston begs to state that when Baron Koller was at this place about ten days ago, he expressed so much annoyance at the delay which had already taken place in regard to the answer to his note of the 5th September, and he requested so earnestly that he might immediately have the reply, that Viscount Palmerston could do no otherwise than send him the answer at once, and Baron Koller despatched it the next day to Vienna.
Viscount Palmerston had put the last paragraph into the answer, because he could scarcely have reconciled it to his own feelings and to his sense of public responsibility to have put his name to a note which might be liable to be called for by Parliament, without expressing in it, at least as his own personal opinion, a sense of the want of propriety evinced by General Haynau in coming to England at the present moment.[38]
The state of public feeling in this country about General Haynau and his proceedings in Italy and Hungary was perfectly well known; and his coming here so soon after those events, without necessity or obligation to do so, was liable to be looked upon as a bravado, and as a challenge to an expression of public opinion.
Baron Koller indeed told Viscount Palmerston that Prince Metternich and Baron Neumann had at Brussels strongly dissuaded General Haynau from coming on to England; and that he (Baron Koller) had after his arrival earnestly entreated him to cut off those long moustachios which rendered him so liable to be identified.