this position, but her warning was unheeded; and yet Lord John soon had reason to regret that he did not lay it to heart. After the Session ended he began to give Aberdeen broad hints that it would be well for him to retire, and to indicate that he himself might have to secede, if these hints were not acted on. His secession would have broken up the Coalition, which, Aberdeen knew, the Sovereign had set her heart on keeping together. Hence, every effort was made to conciliate Lord John Russell, and, as he soon became, next to Palmerston, the most zealous member of the War Party in the Cabinet, he was therefore able to exert a baneful influence on the Foreign Policy of the Ministry. This was, indeed, one reason why that policy perpetually alternated between energy and apathy. Still, the Cabinet kept together till Russell’s Reform scheme was thrust upon it. Then, on the 15th of December, the world was startled to find that Palmerston had resigned. This event, occurring as it did immediately after the massacre of Sinope, created a dreadful sensation in the country. The Press declared that Palmerston had been turned out because of the Eastern Question. He was the victim of a Court intrigue. It was whispered that Prince Albert, as a spy of Russia, had persuaded the Queen to get rid of a high-spirited Minister because he was eager to avenge against Russia the insult offered to England at Sinope. The Prince, it was said, had been detected betraying the secrets of the Government to foreign Courts. One day it was actually reported that he had been committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, and a gaping crowd collected to see him locked up as a traitor. This clamour was raised by the Palmerstonian clique, and it gave infinite pain to the Queen. She knew as well as Lord Palmerston and his friends that these attacks were based on a tissue of falsehoods, for, as a matter of fact, Lord Palmerston had resigned simply on the question of Reform. His idea was that Lord Lansdowne, who also disliked Reform, would resign along with him, and that the public outcry would be so great that the Ministry must be shattered. The outcry was great, but it was too obviously that of a personal claque; and Palmerston, astounded to find that the nation did not regard his retirement as an irreparable calamity, immediately begged the Cabinet to let him come back again. This they did, having, however, forced him to swallow ignominiously his objections to Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill. Then the Palmerstonian newspapers suddenly dropped their attacks on the Queen and Prince Albert, though the Tory organs kept them up in the true old crusted Protectionist style. “The best of the joke,” writes the Prince to Stockmar, “is that because he [Palmerston] went out the Opposition journals extolled him to the skies in order to damage the Ministry, and now the Ministerial journals have to do so in order to justify the reconciliation.” According to Prince Albert, it was the Duke of Newcastle and the Peelites who induced the Cabinet to let the black sheep that had gone astray, return to the fold of the Coalition.[126]
Till the Eastern Question assumed a grave aspect towards the end of the year, the Court seems to have busied itself chiefly about non-political affairs. The Queen, who shared her husband’s artistic tastes, encouraged him in early spring to form a splendid collection of copies of all Raphael’s known works, a fine series of original drawings by that master in Windsor being the nucleus of this interesting collection. It was alas! left to her Majesty to complete it, after the death of her husband made her the sole sad heir of that and many other cherished projects which they had planned together.
Curiously enough, about this time the art treasures of Windsor were very nearly destroyed. A disastrous fire broke out in the Castle on the 19th of March in one of the apartments on the floor over the dining-room on its north side. It burnt outwards, but limited itself to the upper portions of the Prince of Wales’s Tower. It would have destroyed the plate-rooms and the priceless collection known as the Jewelled Armoury, which contained, by the way, the jewelled peacock of Tippoo Sahib among its trophies, adjoining the Octagon-room. The Queen and Prince Albert were not in the Castle when the fire was discovered, but they, with the officials of the household, were soon on the spot. The scene was one of excitement, without confusion. The firemen worked with a will, but the bustle was greatest among the servants and others, who undertook to dismantle the rooms whose costly treasures were in danger. The fire began at ten on Saturday night, and was put out at four o’clock on Sunday morning. The Queen, it seems, was much agitated at first, but she and her ladies soon regained their composure, and watched the conflagration from the drawing-room all through the night.[127]
On the 7th of April another Prince was born to the Royal pair, and on the 18th the Queen was able to write to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, informing him of the event, and of her intention of naming her child after him. “It” [Leopold], she says, “is a name which is the dearest to me after Albert, and one which recalls the almost only happy days of my sad childhood.” The Prince’s other names were to be George, Duncan, and Albert—George after the King of Hanover, and Duncan, so the Queen said, as “a compliment to dear Scotland.” The compliment paid to that country in subsequently conferring on this Prince the title of Duke of Albany was a fateful one for him. It is an unlucky title, and Prince Leopold was not exempt from the evil fortune of most of those who have worn it. On the 23rd of April the Court removed to Osborne, and on the 27th of May the Queen reluctantly returned to London for the season, greatly reinvigorated by her holiday.
One of the events of the London season of 1853 was the establishment of an experimental military camp at Chobham for the purpose of practising sham-fighting. The camp took the place in the season of ’53, that had been held by the Great Exhibition in ’51, and young men of rank who were braving the perils of mimic warfare on the Sussex ridges were the idols of the hour. On
FIRE IN THE PRINCE OF WALES’S TOWER, WINDSOR CASTLE. (See p. 567.)
the 21st of June serious operations began in the presence of the Queen. She rode to the ground on a superb black charger, accompanied by Prince Albert, the King of Hanover, and the Duke of Coburg, the scene as she passed along the lines being most impressive. The moving incidents of the field, the noise of the firing, the shifting panorama of colour, delighted the fashionable crowds who followed her Majesty to what Mr. Disraeli would have called an arena “bright with flashing valour.” On the 14th of July the camp was broken up, and other contingents took the places of the regiments which had formed it. They, however, attempted a movement of real difficulty in endeavouring to effect the passage of the Thames at Runnymede, where the river is deep and the current rapid. Artillery on Cooper’s Hill played on the pontoon bridge murderously, in spite of which, however, it is stated in newspaper records of the day, that several regiments contrived to pass over safely. But the horses that dragged the second gun taken across, took fright, and one of them pulled the rest, with gun and gunners, into the water. The men were saved. The four leading horses, however, met with a strange death. They rose to the surface, and, with eyes and nostrils dilated with terror, beat the water in vain, for the gun, of course, held them