The triumph of Palmerston at the General Election had an immediate effect upon those Franco-Russian intrigues for the settlement of the Danubian Principalities which had given the Queen some uneasiness. The approaching visit of the Grand Duke Constantine to Paris had been commented on severely by the English press, and the Emperor of the French, in writing to the Queen to congratulate her on the birth of the Princess Beatrice, attempted to explain away the significance of the visit. Lord Clarendon suggested that Prince Albert should reply to this letter, telling the Emperor quite frankly why England was jealous of the advances of Russia to France. An alliance between France and England, said the Prince in his letter, could have no basis save the mutual desire to develop as much as possible Art, Science, Letters, Commerce—in a word, everything that is meant by Civilisation. But as for an alliance with Russia, on what basis could that be raised? What interest had Russia in Progress? What was there in common between modern France and modern Russia? A Franco-Russian alliance, therefore, could have no foundation but that of political interest—and hence the prospect of it alarmed the free States of Europe.
Prince Albert’s reception at Manchester, where he opened the great Art Treasures Exhibition on the 5th of May, delighted the Queen. But of all the incidents of his tour, perhaps none pleased her more than the manner in which his speech at the unveiling of her statue in the Peel Park of that city was criticised by the public. In his address he alluded to the devotion of the people to their Queen, and spoke of it as the outcome of their attachment to the Sovereign “as the representative of the institutions of the country.” The phrase struck the popular fancy, and to the Queen it seemed the formula of her position and her life. Two days later the Court removed to Osborne, where the Queen gradually recovered from the depression of spirits under which she had sunk after the death of the Duchess of Gloucester.
On the 16th of May the Prussian Official Gazette announced the forthcoming marriage of the Princess Royal and Prince Frederick William, and on the 19th the same announcement was made to Parliament by a Royal Message. In this Message the Queen expressed her confidence that the nation would make a suitable provision for her eldest daughter, and it is worth recording that at the outset the Cabinet were a little uncertain as to the reception which such a Message would meet with. Perhaps that was why Lord Palmerston, in moving the Address in reply to it, took pains to tell Parliament that, quite apart from the personal interest which Englishmen felt in this affair, it held out political prospects “not undeserving the attention of the House.” Family alliances tended, he argued, to mitigate the asperities which from time to time spring from diversities of national interests. “Therefore,” he added, “I trust that this marriage may also be considered as holding out an increased prospect of goodwill and of cordiality among the Great Powers of Europe.”
But in those days the Representatives of the people, were more jealous guardians of the public purse than they are now, and on both sides of the House there was a strong feeling against increasing public expenditure. The competition then was in economy—not as now in profuse extravagance. There were three views current on the subject. One was that of Prince Albert, who thought that the time had come when Parliament should settle finally what provision ought to be made for members of the Royal Family on their marriage, so as to avoid the necessity of frequent eleemosynary appeals to Parliament. He held, and as it now seems rightly, that the feeling of the country at the time ran in favour of treating the Queen’s children generously. In one of his letters to Baron Stockmar he says, “Seeing how marked was the desire to keep questions relating to the Royal Family aloof from the pressure of party conflict, and to have them settled, I believe it would have been an easy matter to have carried through the future endowments of them all, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s and Palmerston’s original plan, which was subsequently dropped by the Cabinet.”[356] Then there was the Ministerial view, which was that the Princess should be voted a dowry and an annuity; and the Radical view, which was that the nation should not be burdened with an annuity, but that whatever was voted to the lady should be a lump sum, so that when the vote was passed the Princess would cease to be a yearly charge on the country she was leaving. Mr. Roebuck gave expression to this last view, even before the Chancellor of the Exchequer laid his proposal before the House—which was that the annuity should be £8,000, and the marriage portion £40,000. The majority of the House, however, desired to come to a unanimous vote on the subject, and they laughed at Sir George Lewis’s grave citations from Blackstone and his precedents from the reign of George II. Still more
THE HASTINGS CHANTRY, ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, WINDSOR.
heartily did they laugh when he explained how the Queen had recently been forced to bear very large expenses of a public nature, alluding particularly to the visit to the Emperor Napoleon—“a visit,” said Sir George, solemnly, “which was purely for public and State purposes, and not for her individual pleasure.”[357] No doubt the visits of George IV. to Hanover, Ireland, and Scotland were paid for by the State. But it was as ridiculous to cite such a bad precedent as that, as to go back for others to the reign of George III., when Parliament at different times voted a total sum of £3,297,000 to pay the debts of the Royal Family. The truth is, that the Sovereign cannot be held exempt from the ordinary liabilities of exalted rank and station. Every person who accepts a high public office is in the habit, now and then, of drawing on his private income to enable him to discharge his public duties with greater efficiency—in fact, this liability is simply one of the incidents of great estate in every aristocratic country. But, unfortunately, the Queen had on her accession surrendered her Crown revenues to Parliament for a fixed annuity, on the more or less formal understanding that Parliament would provide for her children when they settled in life. So that the House of Commons felt there was really no choice in the matter, save to vote the grant, and if possible, out of respect for the Queen, vote it unanimously. Mr. Roebuck withdrew his opposition, but on the report of the vote in Supply, Mr. Coningham, Member for Brighton, entered a protest against the principle of voting annuities to the Royal Family, and moved the reduction of the vote in this instance from £8,000 to £6,000 a year. The motion was lost by 328 to 14. Mr. Maguire and Sir J. Trelawny, supported by Mr. Coningham, then argued that the annuity was enough, and moved that there be no dowry granted. They were beaten by a vote of 361 to 18, and here the matter ended. “We have,” writes Prince Albert to Stockmar, “established a good precedent, not merely for the grant itself, but for the way and manner in which such grants should be dealt with.”[358] This opinion he would perhaps have recast had he lived to see the painful position in which the Royal Family have again and again been placed by repeated applications of the precedent.
Just before the Court left Osborne, the Grand Duke Constantine paid the Queen his long expected visit. He arrived on the 30th and left next night, after going with her Majesty to see the fleet at Spithead. His visit was not quite a pleasant one for the Queen and Lord Palmerston. The Grand Duke, to their surprise, spoke with almost cynical candour of the Crimean War; indeed, it was not till his visit that the Queen had brought home to her effectually the murderous mistakes of that campaign. He told her about Menschikoff’s blundering, and showed her how Sebastopol was at the mercy of the Allies after the Battle of the Alma, because there were only two battalions in the city; and further indulged in many cheering reminiscences of a similar sort, especially in reference to the attacks on the Redan. But as he had just come from Paris, one wonders if he told his English hosts how it was that the Emperor discovered that the Malakoff was the weak point in the defences of the town.[359] On the 3rd of June the Court returned to Windsor, and the Queen went to Ascot Races, and admired the beautiful mare, Blink Bonny, which was brought out for her inspection.[360] The first Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, however, provided a stronger attraction than Ascot for the Queen and her husband, and her visit to it is described in glowing terms by contemporary chroniclers. It was the precursor of these great festivals which have since become world-famous, and on the 17th, when the Queen was present, Judas Maccabæus was given by 2,500 performers.
The christening of the Princess Beatrice took place in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on the 16th of June, and among the visitors and guests the Archduke Maximilian of Austria was one of the most prominent. He had become betrothed to the Princess Charlotte of Belgium, a young and beautiful princess, to whom the Queen was deeply attached. It was a love match, but the lives of the young people, radiant at the outset with sunshine, were darkened at the end by the gloom of an awful tragedy. In an evil moment the Archduke permitted the French Emperor to lure him into his wild project for establishing a Transatlantic-Latin Empire as a counterpoise to the Anglo-Saxon Republic of the West. He was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1863, and deposed and shot by order of the President of the Mexican Republic in 1867. His unhappy consort passed the rest of her existence in the living death of insanity.