to the purchase of a site at South Kensington, for the Science and Art Institution which he hoped to see created. Ninety acres of land were bought for £342,500, of which sum Government advanced £177,500, with the intention of transferring the National Gallery to the site. The agent of the Commissioners, however, had in purchasing the land stupidly agreed to take it on a building lease, under conditions which would have destroyed their plans, and involved them in the dilemma of repudiating their agent, or incurring liabilities to erect dwelling-houses, which they dared not undertake. The vendor, Baron Villars, generously permitted them to make other arrangements for buying the fee-simple of the land; but the anxieties of the Prince during the period when the issue was in suspense preyed terribly on his mind and health, and the Queen has herself recorded how she exhausted all means in her power to cheer and sustain him in his distress.
THE QUEEN’S VISIT TO THE BRITANNIA TUBULAR BRIDGE.
Her Majesty’s birthday was spent in the sunshine of domestic happiness at Osborne. In the festivities of the season the Queen, early in June, assures her uncle, King Leopold, that she and her family joined only to a limited extent. They gave two State balls and two State concerts. They go, she says, three or four times a week to the play or opera, are hardly ever later than midnight in going to bed and, but for the fagging business of public affairs, the Season “would be nothing to us.” During the summer, life at Osborne was diversified by several short yachting excursions round the South Coast. In August the Queen planned and carried out a brief visit to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, reaching Antwerp on the 10th in the Royal yacht in a tempest of wind and rain. At the King’s country seat at Laeken the Royal party spent four bright and happy days, saddened only by the too visible gap in the family circle, left by the death of Queen Louise. The disagreeable and tempestuous voyage homeward was only broken by a charming visit to Terneusen, where the simple hospitality and quaint old-world ways of the villagers greatly delighted her Majesty, who seems to have passed a pleasant day among them.
On the 30th of August her Majesty was amazed to receive information at Balmoral to the effect that an eccentric old barrister called Nield had bequeathed a legacy of £250,000 to her. John Camden Nield was a miser, who had pinched and starved himself for thirty years to add to his patrimony. The Queen very properly resolved to refuse the legacy if Mr. Nield had any relations living who had a claim to the money;[73] but as it appeared he had none, she accepted the gift. The holiday at Balmoral was as bright and happy as could be wished. “Nothing,” writes Lord Malmesbury, who was in attendance on the Queen at this time, “can exceed the good nature with which I am treated, both by her Majesty and the Prince. Balmoral is an old country house in bad repair, and totally unfit for Royal personages.... The Royal party consists of the Duchess of Kent, the ladies in waiting, Colonel Phipps, and Sir Arthur Gordon. The rooms are so small that I am obliged to write my despatches on my bed, and to keep the window constantly open to admit the necessary quantity of air; and my private secretary, George Harris, lodged somewhere three miles off. We played at billiards every evening, the Queen and the Duchess being constantly obliged to get up from their chairs to be out of the way of the cues. Nothing could be more cheerful and evidently perfectly happy than the Queen and Prince, or more kind to every one round them. I never met any man so remarkable for the variety of information on all subjects as the latter, with a great fund of humour quand il se déboutonne.” The Prince himself records in his Diary,[74] however, that “Balmoral is in full splendour, and the people there are very glad that it is now entirely our own.” On the 4th of September Lord Malmesbury writes:—“The Prince had a wood driven not far from the house. After we had been posted in line, two fine stags passed me, which I missed. Colonel Phipps fired next, and lastly, the Prince, without any effect. The Queen had come out to see the sport, lying down in the heather by the Prince, and witnessed all these fiascos, to our humiliation.”[75] This happy holiday was sadly broken by the death of the Duke of Wellington, which brought the Court unexpectedly back to Windsor in October, their route being through Edinburgh, Preston, Chester, and North Wales, where they inspected, on the 14th of October, the Britannia tubular bridge over the Menai Straits. The Queen drove through the bridge in a State carriage drawn by men, while Prince Albert, accompanied by Mr. R. Stephenson, walked across on the roof of the tube. On reaching the south end, the party descended to the water’s edge, from which they obtained a complete view of the magnificent proportions of the gigantic structure.
During 1852 one striking event in Foreign Affairs that occupied the attention of the Queen was the transformation of the French Republic into the Second Empire. In Paris, on the 1st of January, Charles Louis Napoleon was installed at Notre Dame as President of France, and he promulgated a new Constitution, preserving little of the form and none of the spirit of Liberty. The whole Executive was to be vested in the President, who was to be advised by a Council of State, a Senate of nobles nominated for life, and a powerless legislative body elected by universal suffrage for six years, whose transactions at the demand of five members could be kept secret. The next step taken by the Prince-President was to issue Decrees on the 23rd of January, compelling the Orleans Princes to sell their real and personal property in France within a year, and confiscating the property settled on the family by Louis Philippe previous to his accession in 1830. This raised a storm of indignation among all Frenchmen who were not accomplices of the Prince-President in the coup d’état, and it caused Montalembert to resign his seat on the Consultative Commission of the 2nd of December. De Morny and Fould also resigned, M. de Persigny replacing the former.[76] To the Queen, whose partiality for the Orleans family was well known, these Decrees were painfully offensive. The Prince-President’s strongest partisan in England, Lord Malmesbury, wrote a letter remonstrating with him, and the reply serves to illustrate the character of the men who consented to serve in the Senate. “He (the Prince-President),” says Lord Malmesbury in a letter to Lord Cowley, British Ambassador at Paris, “declared the confiscation necessary, as even some of his own Senators had been tampered with by Orleanist agents and money.”[77] On September 13th this patriotic Senate prayed for “the
