“After the Council for the Speech from the Throne for the Prorogation of Parliament on the 14th I saw Lord Palmerston, as he had desired it. He was very much agitated, shook, and had tears in his eyes, so as to quite move me, who never under any circumstances had known him otherwise than with a bland smile on his face.” It was not the condemnation of his policy, he told Prince Albert, that affected him most closely. The “accusation that he had been wanting in his respect to the Queen, whom he had every reason to respect as his Sovereign, and as a woman whose virtues he admired, and to whom he was bound by every tie of duty and gratitude, was an imputation on his honour as a gentleman, and if he could have made himself guilty of it, he was almost no longer fit to be tolerated in society.”[25] The “almost” is
LORD JOHN RUSSELL (1850).
characteristically Palmerstonian. Her Majesty, according to Prince Albert, did not impute any intentional want of regard to Lord Palmerston; but her complaint was that he never submitted any question to her “intact,” that is to say, he always contrived to commit the Government before the Queen could express an opinion. As her opinion had of late been at variance with Lord Palmerston’s, this mode of doing business was to her objectionable. Her Majesty had always been frank with her Ministers, and when overruled, she had accepted loyally their decision. “She knew,” said the Prince, “that they were going to battle together, and that she was going to receive the blows which were aimed at the Government; and that she had these last years received several such as no Sovereign of England had before been obliged to put up with, and which had been most painful to her.” She did not wish to trouble her Ministers about details. But when principles were settled at their conferences, she thought she too should be consulted and advised. Palmerston’s excuse was the old one—want of time; but he said he was willing to come to the Palace at any moment to Prince Albert, and give any explanations that might be wanted either to the Queen or her husband.
If the Prince’s account be correct, the Minister seems to have conducted himself throughout this interview with hysterical servility, which may, however, have been simulated. As for his penitence, it was short-lived. In September he had another quarrel with the Queen over the wording of a despatch, in which he had foolishly gone out of his way to impugn the honour of England. This despatch rose out of the Haynau incident. The Austrian General Haynau had come to England on a visit, and the Radicals stirred up public feeling against him on account of his brutality in crushing the Hungarian insurrection, more especially for his cowardly conduct in stripping women, and flogging them publicly. When he went to visit the Brewery of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins, the workmen in the place recognised him. They turned out en masse, assaulted, hustled, and insulted “the Austrian butcher,” till he fled in terror from the premises, and took refuge in a little public-house, from which the police smuggled him away. Naturally, Lord Palmerston expressed his regret to the Austrian Ambassador; but it was also necessary to send a formal Note on the subject to the Austrian Government. This Note was a model of Palmerstonian maladroitness. In the first place, it contained an uncalled-for imputation on the English people, because it admitted that they were so incapable of courtesy and self-control that no foreigner was safe in England who happened to be unpopular. Secondly, it implied that Haynau had been imprudent in visiting England at all. The Queen, whose views were shared by the Prime Minister, objected to both of these statements—one as derogatory to the honour of England, the other as needlessly offensive to Austria. But, on her objecting, she discovered that it was impossible to alter the Note, which had been sent to the Austrian Ambassador before the draft had been submitted to her. The Queen, however, insisted on the withdrawal of the Note, and so did Lord John Russell. Palmerston first of all tried to browbeat the Prime Minister by threatening to resign. But when Lord John informed him (16th of October) that the threat was futile, Palmerston submissively withdrew the Note, and substituted for it another drawn up in accordance with the Queen’s views.
Another serious conflict of opinion between the Queen and Lord Palmerston at this period arose out of the dispute between Denmark and the German States as to the settlement of Schleswig-Holstein. The German population of these Duchies had revolted against the petty tyranny of the Danes, and it was notorious that they were supported secretly by Prussia. The rebellion was suppressed; and though almost all the Liberals of Europe were in favour of letting the Duchies be incorporated in Germany, the Governments of the various Powers took the contrary view. The Austro-Prussian Convention at Olmütz, of 29th November, restoring peace and stipulating for the disarmament of the Duchies, left the matter uncertain; but Austria was obviously for thwarting, whilst Prussia was for gratifying, the aspirations of the German or national party in the Duchies. All through this controversy the Queen was anti-Austrian, and strongly in favour of letting the Schleswig-Hoisteiners have their own way. Palmerston, and in this he was powerfully supported by the Tories, was violently pro-Austrian, and used the influence of England as far as possible to prevent the Duchies gravitating to Germany. For the moment he was successful. But subsequent events, as all the world knows, justified the wiser and more liberal views of the Queen.
On the 26th of August, 1850, Louis Philippe died; in fact, the sad news of his death greeted the Queen and her husband a few days after their return from a brief visit to the King of the Belgians at Ostend, and marred the celebration of Prince Albert’s thirty-first birthday at Osborne.
On the 27th of August the Royal Family migrated northwards. The Queen and Prince Albert opened the great railway bridges at Newcastle and Berwick, and then went on to Edinburgh, where they stayed at Holyrood Palace.
The reception of the Queen in the “grey metropolis of the North” was picturesque as well as enthusiastic. The Royal Company of Archers in their quaint old costume, headed by the Duke of Buccleuch, claimed their historic right of acting as the Queen’s body-guard, and they surrounded her carriage as it drove through swarming crowds from the railway station to the Palace, in which no Queen of Scotland had set foot since Mary Stuart crossed its threshold, never to return to it again. Immediately after her arrival, the Queen and her family began to explore the Palace and its ruined precincts, and she records her delight in her Diary at discovering in the crumbling Abbey the tomb “of Flora Macdonald’s mother,” not the Flora Macdonald who assisted the Young Pretender to escape, but a lady of the Clanranald family, who was then serving as a Maid of Honour. Next morning the Queen and “the children” drove round the park, and climbed Arthur’s Seat, and the Prince proceeded to lay the foundation-stone of the National Gallery of Arts, whilst the rest of the day was spent in sightseeing. At half-past eight on the following morning her Majesty started for Balmoral, which she reached in the afternoon. Here, as Prince Albert says in one of his letters to Stockmar, they tried to strengthen their hearts amid the stillness and solemnity of the mountains,[26] and truly they had much need of rest. The harassing conflicts with Lord Palmerston, the deaths of Peel, Louis Philippe, Queen Adelaide, the Duke of Cambridge, and the faithful Anson, and the news that the Queen of the Belgians was dying, contributed to produce in the Queen great depression of spirits.