Writing to the Dowager Duchess of Coburg from Osborne, on the 30th of August, Prince Albert says—“We purpose making an escape on the 5th (September) to our mountain home, Balmoral. We are sorely in want of the moral rest, and the bodily exercise.” Balmoral was reached on the 7th, and “the new house,” though not finished, was found to be quite habitable, and “very comfortable.” The Queen was charmed with its appearance, and the home-like welcome she received from her dependants, an old shoe being thrown after her for luck when she entered the Hall. And truly it brought luck—for in two days afterwards Deeside was ruddy with the blaze of the bonfire which was lit on Craig Gowan heights to celebrate the fall of Sebastopol. The bonfire had been prepared the year before, when the false news of the fall of Sebastopol had arrived, and the wind had blown it down on Inkermann Day (5th of November). It was again built up, and on the evening of the 10th, writes Prince Albert to Stockmar, “it illuminated all the peaks round about, and the whole scattered population of the valleys understood the sign, and made for the mountain, where we performed towards midnight a veritable Witches’ Dance, supported by whisky.”[242]
In the same letter the Prince writes, “Prince Fritz William comes here to-morrow evening. I have received a very friendly letter from the Princess of Prussia.” This, says Sir Theodore Martin, made Stockmar’s heart beat fast. He was the recognised matrimonial agent of the House of Coburg, and one of his cherished projects was to arrange a marriage between the young and handsome heir of the Prince of Prussia and the Princess Royal, who, of all the Queen’s children, was in an especial degree his favourite. The young Prussian Prince was indeed the only possible suitor in Europe whose prospects rendered him worthy to mate with a daughter of England. The Queen felt that the day would come when he would be Heir-Apparent not to the Crown of Prussia, but to the Imperial Throne of the German Empire. His family was one of the wealthiest in Europe. His father, afterwards the German Emperor, was a very dear and valued friend of the Queen and her husband, and the young Prince Fritz himself had all those qualities of mind and heart which Prince Albert desired to see in the husband of his eldest child. But the affair was one of some delicacy, because the Queen abhorred the idea of what she called “a political marriage;” indeed, as she was on somewhat unfriendly terms with the King of Prussia, and as Prussia was hated and despised by the English people at the time, the alliance was, from a political point of view, far from desirable. Her Majesty, moreover, had no intention of sanctioning any engagement which might be objectionable to her daughter, and the ultimate decision, therefore, lay with the Princess herself, who at the time knew nothing of the hopes or fears that centred round her. The gossip of Society had connected her name with that of Prince Frederick William. But on the Queen’s return from France at the end of August Prince Albert told Lord Clarendon there was no truth in these rumours.[243] On the 20th of September the Prince laid his proposal of marriage before the Queen and her husband, and they accepted it so far as they were concerned, but asked him not to speak to the Princess on the subject till after her confirmation. The Princess was only sixteen years of age at the time, and the Queen was of opinion that there should be no thought of marriage till the following spring, when her daughter would have passed her seventeenth birthday. On the 23rd Prince Albert writes to Stockmar, telling him that “Victoria is greatly excited. Still, all goes smoothly and prudently,” and that the young Prince is “really in love” with the little lady, “who does her best to please him.” The Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, he says, “are in raptures at the turn the affair has taken.” But when a handsome young Prince is “really in love” with a charming young Princess who “does her best to please him,” and they are both living in the free, unrestrained intercourse of English family life in a romantic Highland retreat, it is hardly practicable to prevent them from coming to an understanding. The Prussian Prince seems to have appealed successfully to the Queen’s good nature, and he soon obtained leave to make his proposal to the Princess before his visit came to an end. “During our ride up Craig-na-ban,” writes the Queen, in “The Leaves from a Journal,” “he (Prince Fritz) picked up a piece of white heather (the emblem of good luck), which he gave to her (the Princess Royal), and this enabled him to make an allusion to his hopes and wishes as they rode down Glen Girnoch.” The lady consented, and the happy pair were betrothed. “The young people,” writes Prince Albert to Stockmar, on the 2nd of October, “are passionately in love with each other, and the integrity, guilelessness, and disinterestedness of the Prince are quite touching.”
“Our Fritz,” as the Prince was affectionately called, was no idle youth of fashion. He was already Colonel of the 1st Foot Guards, and a thorough soldier.[244] In every branch of the Army he had gone through a hard apprenticeship, as may be seen from the peremptory instructions which had been issued when he was ordered to serve with Colonel von Griesheim’s Dragoons. He had to master every elementary detail of drill and organisation, and his knowledge was tested by stern judges.[245] Col. von Griesheim gives the following account of an interview he had with Prince Fritz’s mother in the autumn of 1854:—“Prince Frederick William,” he says, “was then twenty-three. He was a young man of notably amiable manners. I received orders to wait upon his mother the Princess at the Palace, when she told me that she wished to speak to me as the new Commander of the Regiment, and I must do her the justice to say that she did not allow her motherly love for a son, or her anxiety to secure his personal comforts, to stand in the way of his duty. On the contrary, she begged me that I would in no way unduly spare the Prince, but insist on his learning his profession in every branch, so that he might be in a position to judge what was the real amount of labour which a military life entailed. She also desired that in non-military matters no special external respect might be shown him, expressing, at the same time, her confidence that neither I nor my brother-officers would abuse the relationship in which we were placed. She was sure I should not forget that it was the training of our future king that was entrusted to me, and that I should recognise the obligation of setting things in their true light, that a true judgment might be formed concerning them. The Princess was proceeding to talk over a number of incidental matters when, quite unaccompanied, the Prince of Prussia came into the room. He looked surprised, and said, ‘Ah! I see the new Commander is receiving the orders of the dear mamma.’ He laughed good-humouredly, and holding out his hand with the cordiality peculiar to him, added that I did not need any instruction from him, and that the length of time he had known me was a guarantee that the Prince was in good hands. Turning to his wife he smiled, and said in an undertone, “I trained Griesheim, and now he shall train our son.’”[246]
Prince Frederick William had thoroughly fulfilled the hopes of his parents and his tutor, and he was precisely the type of man likely to win favour in Prince Albert’s eyes. It was, therefore, with supreme disgust that the Queen and her husband discovered an attempt would be made to prejudice public opinion against the marriage. The engagement was not to be announced till after Easter. And yet the Times began to attack the Queen, Prince Albert, and the Prussian Court, for bringing about such an alliance. The country was told that the Princess Royal was being sacrificed to “a paltry German dynasty,” and Prince Fritz was jeered at as a poor creature, who would have to pick up a livelihood in the Russian service, and “pass these years which flattering anticipation now destines to a Crown, in ignominious attendance as a General Officer on the levee of his Imperial master, having lost even the privilege of his birth, which is conceded to no German in Russia.” Malignity as well as ignorance inspired this abuse, for it was at that time the cue of a certain section of polite society to hold Prince Albert up to odium on every possible occasion as a tool of the despotic European Courts. As a matter of fact, the young Prince’s sympathies were with the Opposition rather than with the Government in Prussia, and he was in the habit of seeking Prince Albert’s advice as to how he should steer his course in the stormy sea of Prussian politics. Very sound and wise guidance did the Prince get from his future father-in-law, who viewed with delight and hopefulness his assiduous efforts to fit himself for his high destiny. “In another way,” he writes to the young Prince, “Vicky is also busy; she has learned much in various directions.... She now comes to me every evening from six to seven, when I put her through a kind of general catechising, and, in order to give precision to her ideas, I make her work out certain subjects by herself, and bring me the results to be revised. Thus she is now engaged in writing a short compendium of Roman history.”[247]
THE WOOING OF THE PRINCESS ROYAL.
On the 30th of November the King of Sardinia, accompanied by Count Cavour, arrived in London to visit the Queen and Prince Albert. A rough, frank, good-humoured cavalry officer, passionately devoted to field sports, and fired with an ardent love of Italy and a bitter hatred of all foes of Italian Unity—such was our ally, Victor Emmanuel. He had been preceded by his social reputation in Paris, which was, in truth, such as to make the Queen somewhat nervous. Lord Malmesbury, writing in his Diary on the 29th of November, says, “The King of Sardinia, who is here (Paris), is as vulgar and coarse as possible.”[248]
