On the 2nd of December the Royal home was turned into a house of mourning. On that day the good Dowager-Queen Adelaide passed away from among the small but appreciative circle of friends and relatives who admired and loved her. The Queen’s grief was deep and sincere. “Though we daily expected this sad event,” writes her Majesty to King Leopold, “yet it came so suddenly when it did come, as if she had never been ill, and I can hardly realise the truth now.... She was truly motherly in her kindness to us and our children, and it always made her happy to be with us and to see us!”[11]
Queen Adelaide, it may be here noted, was one of the earliest of funeral reformers. Struck by the wastefulness and the bad taste of funereal pageants, she left what the Queen calls “the most affecting directions” for her burial, ordering that it should be conducted with the utmost simplicity and privacy—the only exceptional arrangement being that she desired her coffin to be borne by seamen, in homage to the memory of her husband, William IV., the Sailor-King. A simple-hearted, kindly, Christian lady, whose hands were ever swift in doing good—such is a brief abstract of the life and character of the Dowager-Queen Adelaide.
THE CHAMBER OF REPRESENTATIVES, BRUSSELS.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CLOUDS IN THE EAST AND ELSEWHERE.
Political Wreckage—Force triumphs over Opinion—The State of France—Election of Prince Charles Louis Bonaparte as Prince-President—The Sad Plight of Italy—Palmerston’s Anti-Austrian Policy—Defeat of Piedmont—The Fall of Venice—Fall of the Roman Republic—A Cromwellian Struggle in Prussia—The Queen’s Partisanship—Her Prussian Sympathies—The Hungarian Refugees in Turkey—A Diplomatic Conflict with Russia—Opening of Parliament—Mr. Disraeli and Local Taxation—Parliamentary Reform—The Jonahs of the Cabinet—The Dispute with Greece—Don Pacifico’s case—Coercion of Greece—Lord Palmerston meekly accepts an Insult from Russia—French Intervention—A Diplomatic Conflict in France—Recall of the French Ambassador—False Statements in Parliament—The Queen’s Indignation—The Don Pacifico Debate—The Civis Romanus sum Doctrine—Palmerston’s Victory—The West African Slave Trade.
When the year 1850 opened the counter-revolution had been accomplished. Much political and social wreckage disfigured the Continent, but the tempest which had produced it was over. What remained was an uneasy after-swell agitating the restless ocean of discontent. Force had, in fact, triumphed over opinion, and Europe was at last tranquil.
In France, after Louis Philippe fell, the country was left a prey to four factions or parties. One demanded an absolute monarchy; another demanded a parliamentary monarchy; a third demanded a military empire, based on universal suffrage; a fourth demanded a republic. The partisans of the republic triumphed in the first instance. But it fell, a victim to the voracity of its own children. The Government of Lamartine was poetic and Utopian,