pinned the Cross on his breast with her own hands, whilst the Prince Consort saluted him with grave and respectful courtesy. As each soldier or sailor was decorated, the vast concourse of spectators cheered and clapped their hands—whether he were an officer whose breast was already glittering with stars and orders, or a humble private or Jack Tar whose rough tunic carried no more resplendent embellishment than the ordinary war medal. But of all the cheers none were heartier than those which were given for a man who, when called out, stepped forward arrayed in what was then the grotesque and pacific garb of an ordinary policeman.
The Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, which had been opened in May by the Prince Consort, had become amazingly popular. It was the first of its kind seen in England, and the great difficulty which its organisers had to overcome was the reluctance of private collectors to lend works of art for exhibition. But for the Queen and Prince Albert it is probable this obstacle would never have been surmounted,[362] and hence it was but natural that her Majesty should desire to visit the collection. Her reception at Manchester, on the 30th of June, was enthusiastic, a crowd of a million people welcoming her, as she said herself, with “kind and friendly faces.” The display of Prussian flags, and the complimentary allusions to her husband and to her eldest daughter’s approaching marriage, appear to have touched her deeply. At the Exhibition, her Majesty knighted the Mayor, as she observes, “with Sir Harry Smith’s sword, which had been in four general actions,” and on the 2nd of July she left for Buckingham Palace, where she gave a great musical party in the evening. The next event of importance in the home-life of the Queen was the departure of the Prince of Wales to Königswinter, where it had been arranged he was to carry on his studies. He left in high spirits, and with the Queen’s anxious adieus, on the 26th of July, accompanied by young Mr. Frederick Stanley—now Lord Stanley of Preston—General Grey, Sir H. Ponsonby, and his tutors. Mr. Gladstone’s son, Mr. C. Wood, son of Lord Halifax, and the present Lord Cadogan, were also selected by the Queen and Prince Consort to join him as companions in his studies.
From this time till the tide of war in India turned in our favour, the Queen’s attention seems to have been absorbed by the crisis in our Eastern Empire. Her political work was apparently concentrated in a persistent effort to induce the Cabinet not only to hurry out reinforcements, but to replace them by increasing the establishment at home up to the full limit voted by Parliament, and for which estimates had been taken. Lord Palmerston, on the other hand, in his light and airy way, refused to regard the Mutiny as serious, and persisted in sending out reinforcements in driblets, and then replacing them by driblets of recruits. The Queen very sensibly contended that the force absorbed by the Indian demand should “be replaced to its full extent and in the same kind,” whereas the Cabinet was replacing whole battalions by “handfuls of recruits added to the remaining ones.” It was in vain that the Minister met her with the usual stock platitudes—that neither the money nor the men could be got. The Queen replied that her project would actually be more economical than the confused and unmethodical devices of Palmerston and Panmure. The East India Company would find the money for the reinforcements, which could be applied to the creation of new battalions. But these could in turn absorb the old half-pay officers reduced from the War Establishment, who would then cease to be a burden on the Exchequer. As to the argument that the men could not be got, the Queen wrote to Lord Palmerston, “This is an hypothesis, and not an argument. Try, and you will see. If you do not succeed, and the measure is necessary, you will have to adopt means to make it succeed. If you conjure up the difficulties yourself you cannot, of course, succeed.” One fact may be mentioned as curiously illustrating the shallowness of understanding and feebleness of grasp with which Palmerston approached any great question of State to which Foreign Office formulæ could not be applied. He, or some one at his instigation, seems to have tried to frighten the Queen by warning her that the East India Company would object to keep up such a large addition to her army in India. The Queen, however, saw what Palmerston could not see—that the first shot fired in the rebellion had virtually eliminated the Company as a dominating factor in the Indian problem. “The Queen,” she writes to Palmerston, “thinks it next to impossible that the European force could again be decreased in India. After the present fearful experience the Company could only send back (home) Queen’s regiments, in order to raise new European ones of their own. This they cannot do without the Queen’s sanction, and she must at once make her most solemn protest against such a measure. It would be dangerous and unconstitutional to allow private individuals to raise an army of Queen’s subjects larger than her own in any part of the British dominions.” And at the close of the Memorandum, which she haughtily desires Palmerston to communicate to his colleagues, the tone becomes sharper as she sums up the net result of the bungling military policy of the Cabinet. “The present situation of the Queen’s army,” she writes, “is a pitiable one. The Queen has just seen, in the camp at Aldershot, regiments which, after eighteen years’ foreign service in most trying climates, had come back to England to be sent out, after seven months, to the Crimea. Having passed through this destructive campaign, they had not been home for a year before they are to go to India for perhaps twenty years! This is most cruel and unfair to the gallant men who devote their services to the country, and the Government is in duty and humanity bound to alleviate their position.”[363]
In August a flying visit to Cherbourg in her yacht convinced the Queen that the growing strength of this port as a place of arms was dangerous to England, and on her return she called the attention of the Cabinet to what she had seen, and demanded reports as to the precise state of the defences on the South coast of England. As usual, nobody could find the required information, and when it was obtained Lord Clarendon told the Prince Consort that nobody could read such an account of our shortcomings without immediately desiring to remedy them. September saw the Court at Balmoral, where the Queen’s holiday was sadly overcast by the Indian reports which came pouring in. As the Prince Consort said, in one of his letters to Stockmar, they were “tortured by the events in India, which are truly frightful!” The French Emperor’s courteous offer to pass our reinforcements through France brought some cheerfulness to the anxious Sovereign, not diminished by the friendly offer of two regiments from Belgium—which was, however, rejected by Lord Palmerston, who had sense enough to see that if England was to win at all she must, as he said, “win off her own bat.”
On the 16th of October the Court returned to Windsor, the Queen having spent a night at Haddo House, where she went to visit her venerable friend, Lord Aberdeen. The sudden death of the Duchess of Nemours, first cousin of the Queen and Prince Consort, and wife of the second son of Louis Philippe, now threw the Court into mourning. “We were like sisters,” wrote Her Majesty to King Leopold, “bore the same name, married the same year, our children are the same age; there was, in short, a similarity between us, which, since 1839, united us closely and tenderly. Now one of us is gone—passed as a rose, full-blown and faded—from this earth to eternity, there to rest in peace and joy.”[364] The commercial crisis of November caused Parliament to be summoned before the year closed, and December was spent in making preparations for the marriage of the Princess Royal.
When the 19th of January, 1858, came round Buckingham Palace was full of guests—the King of the Belgians and his sons, the Prince and Princess of Prussia and their suites, being among the number. It was a brilliant scene of bustle and excitement, covers for eighty or ninety guests being laid daily at dinner. Four dramatic representations were given by command at Her Majesty’s Theatre, where, writes the Queen, “We made a wonderful row of royalties, I sitting between dear uncle and the Prince of Prussia,” and where the audience cheered the young couple who were to be so soon united with a cordiality that brought tears to their parents’ eyes. Balls, dinners, musical parties, celebrated the coming event at the Palace, till the 24th, which is recorded in the Queen’s Diary as “poor dear Vicky’s last unmarried day ... an eventful one, reminding me of my own.” Charming in its simplicity is the Queen’s description of the family delight over the wedding gifts; and the tearful “Good-night” of the 24th between the Princess and her parents is too sacred a subject for more than passing allusion. On the 25th, the eventful day of the wedding, the Queen writes, “I felt as if I were being married over again myself, only much more nervous, for I had not that blessed feeling which I had then, which raises and supports one, of giving myself up for life to him whom I loved and worshipped—then and for ever.” But the sun shone with happy omen as the morning advanced, and the wedding party, amidst cheering crowds, proceeded to the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace.
THE CRIMSON DRAWING-ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE.
This interesting building had been put to strange uses in its time. It had been in turn a Roman Catholic chapel, a Protestant chapel, a guard-room, and a store-room, before it ended as a chapel reserved for Royal nuptials. Within its walls Queen Anne had married good-natured George of Denmark, and George III. the shrew of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It was the scene of the wedding of the ill-fated Caroline of Brunswick and the “First Gentleman of Europe,” who, it may be remembered, had to be fortified with brandy ere he could undergo the ceremony. Here, also, William IV. wedded the amiable and gentle Queen Adelaide, and his successor plighted her troth to the husband of her heart. But not even on that occasion was the chapel the scene of a more brilliant pageant than when it witnessed the nuptials of the Princess Royal of England and the son of the Prince of Prussia. The dingy edifice, which Holbein’s admirers revere as a triumph of his genius, was now no longer dingy. Hangings of crimson silk, gleaming with gold fringe and tassels, gilded columns and scroll work, gold headings, and emblazoned shields and ciphers, dispelled the customary gloom from the building. The altar, too, was sumptuously equipped with quaint “services” of gold plate, illustrative of the Augustan age of English Art.