Only one anxiety had intruded itself during the Prussian tour—the issue of the Queen’s Proclamation to the Indian people on assuming the government of India. She objected strongly to the draft of it which was submitted to her, and begged Lord Derby to write one out for her in “his own excellent language,” keeping in view “that it is a female Sovereign who speaks to more than a hundred millions of Eastern people on assuming the direct government over them after a bloody civil war, giving them pledges which her future reign is to redeem.” Such a Proclamation should, says her Majesty, emphasise the ideas of generosity, benevolence, religious toleration, liberty, and equality before the law. What offended her deeply in the draft was a menace reminding the Indian people that she had “the power of undermining” native religions and customs. Her Majesty, writes Lord Malmesbury by her directions, “would prefer that the subject should be introduced by a declaration in the sense that the deep attachment which her Majesty feels to her own religion, and the comfort and happiness which she derives from its consolations, will preclude her from any attempt to interfere with native religions.” The name of the official personage who drew up this blundering and exasperating Proclamation, which the Queen had the good sense and good taste to cancel, need not be mentioned. It is but just to Lord Derby to say that when the Queen’s objections were telegraphed to him he examined the document, and so completely agreed with her Majesty that he re-wrote the Proclamation in a manner that anticipated her detailed instructions. A few additions were made to it by the Queen, and when it was issued it was hailed with delight by the Natives as the Magna Charta of India.
THE QUEEN LEAVING THE TOWN HALL, LEEDS.
On the 6th of September the Queen and Prince Albert proceeded to Leeds to open the splendid Town Hall which the people of that borough had built, and where they were welcomed by the most picturesque Mayor in England, who in his robes and bearing, wrote the Queen, was “the personification of a Venetian Doge.” Needless to say then that, after the Hall was opened, Mr. Mayor Fairbairn was knighted. The Royal Family next sped northwards to Balmoral, where Prince Albert brought down his first stag on the 14th, and where the whole household gazed nightly at Donati’s comet, which blazed with peculiar brilliancy in the clear and “nimble air” of the Highlands. Among the superstitious mountaineers it was held to be a portent of war and pestilence. At Balmoral the Queen became involved in a discussion with her Ministers as to the future of the Indian Army. Who was to command it—the Queen through the British Commander-in-Chief, or the Queen through the Secretary of State in Council, as successors to the old East India Company and Board of Control? Her Majesty stoutly contended that the union between the British and Indian Armies should be completed by their being placed under the same supreme authority—namely, the Commander-in-Chief in India. The Indian Council grasping at patronage, however, held that though the Commanders-in-Chief in the Presidencies should not be subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief in India, except in respect of the Queen’s troops under their order, over the Native troops in their presidencies their authority must be supreme. Lord Clyde took the Queen’s view of the matter, and so did General Peel, War Secretary, and also the Prince Consort, and in 1860, when the controversy ended, it was her view that prevailed. Towards the end of the Balmoral holiday the Queen and her husband were greatly delighted to find that their much-loved friend, the Prince of Prussia, had finally been chosen Prince Regent in succession to his brother, the king, who had become too infirm in mind and body to hold the reins of Government. The Prince Regent (afterwards German Emperor) and Prince Albert were not only warm friends, but were in close confidential correspondence on public affairs, and the Queen and her husband alike looked to him as the only possible deliverer of Prussia from Absolutist Administrations dominated by Russian ascendency. Their counsels had a powerful influence on the Prussian Regent’s policy at the outset of his career, when he dismissed the Manteuffel Ministry, and initiated an era of moderate constitutional progress in his country. Indirectly, they conferred a marked benefit on this country at the same time. The foreign policy of Prussia, which had up till now seemed to be antipathetic to England, changed. Without abating any of their zeal for their respective interests, the Foreign Offices of the two countries found it much easier than it had been to work together in matters of general interest. This cordiality between the Courts of Berlin and St. James’s was promoted by the kindness which the Prince Regent bestowed on the Prince of Wales when, in November, he proceeded to Berlin to visit his sister. He returned, not only bearing with him a confidential letter from the Prince Regent to his father, but with it the Order of the Black Eagle, which had been, greatly to his delight, bestowed upon him. He had just completed his eighteenth year, and had been promoted to a colonelcy in the army. Colonel Bruce was now his governor—his tutor, Mr. Gibbs, having retired. The Prince had, in fact, become emancipated from pupilage, and Mr. Greville referring to this event says in his “Memoirs,” “I hear the Queen has written a letter to the Prince of Wales announcing to him his emancipation from parental authority and control, and that it is one of the most admirable letters ever penned. She tells him that he may have thought the rule they adopted for his education a severe one, but that his welfare was their only object; and well knowing to what seductions of flattery he would eventually be exposed, they wished to prepare and strengthen his mind against them, that he was now to consider himself his own master, and that they should never intrude any advice upon him, although always ready to give it him whenever he thought fit to seek it. It was a very long letter all in that line, and it seems to have made a profound impression on the Prince, and to have touched his feelings to the quick. He brought it to Gerald Wellesley in floods of tears, and the effect it produced is a proof of the wisdom which dictated its composition.”[35]
A fresh cause of disagreement had, however, now arisen with France. The seizure of a French slaver, called the Charles-et-Georges, by the Portuguese authorities at Mozambique, tempted the French Government to demand its surrender, and an indemnity whilst her status was sub judice. Coercion was threatened by the appearance of a French squadron in the Tagus, and an offer on the part of Portugal to submit to arbitration was refused. Englishmen in these circumstances gave vent to much indignation against a revival of the old brutal methods of Bonapartism in dealing with a small Power, and this indignation was shared by the Queen, though it was prudently veiled, her personal relations with the Portuguese Court being of an unusually cordial character. Lord Malmesbury was also well known not only to be a partisan of the French alliance, but a personal friend of the French Emperor. This led many to suspect that the British Government had played into the hands of France; and Lord Malmesbury’s policy was, in truth, so spiritless in defence of Portugal, that the Portuguese, fearing to waste time in appealing for the good offices of England, yielded to the overbearing menaces of France. At the same time, it is quite clear, from a sentence in one of the Prince Consort’s letters to Baron Stockmar, that the Court, on the whole, approved of the Foreign Secretary’s policy, which, at all events, kept the country clear of war. The loyal reception of the Queen’s Proclamation in India on the 17th of October, and the end of the rebellion in Oudh, gladdened the closing months of 1858. Over these, however, the first symptoms of the Prince Consort’s failing health projected the slowly-advancing shadow, that was so soon to shroud the remainder of the Queen’s career in widowed sorrow.
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.
Napoleon’s New Year’s Reception—The Secret pacte de famille—Victor Emmanuel and the Grido di Dolore—The Queen’s Views on the Italian Movement—The Queen’s Letter to Napoleon—Meeting of Parliament—Cavour Threatens Napoleon—Appeal of Prussia to the Queen for Advice—Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill—Lord John Russell’s Amendment—Defeat of the Government—An Appeal to the Country—The Queen Criticises Austria’s Blunders—War at Last—The General Election—Reconciliation of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell—Fall of the Derby-Disraeli Administration—The Palmerston-Russell Ministry—Austrian Defeats and French Victories—The Peace of Villafranca—Palmerston Duped—Illness of the Duchess of Kent—The Budget—The Queen and Palmerston—Triumph of the Queen’s Policy—The Holiday at Balmoral—Dancing in the New Year.
Not easily will the world forget the New Year’s Day of 1859. “I regret,” said the French Emperor to Baron Hubner, the Austrian Ambassador, at the reception at the Tuileries, “that the relations between our two countries are not more satisfactory; but I beg you to assure the Emperor (of Austria) that they in no respect alter my feelings of friendship to himself.” Taken in connection with the rumoured results of Continental intrigues, but one interpretation could be put on these words. The restlessness of France was to be appeased by a war for the deliverance of Italy from the Hapsburgs, and the bombs of Orsini had forced the Emperor to be faithful to his forgotten engagements to his old comrades among the Carbonari. The Emperor’s own story was that he felt convinced there could be no peace in Europe unless the Territorial Settlement of 1815 was revised. He professed to have aimed at effecting that object by the regeneration of Poland. The Crimean War having, however, proved this scheme to be futile, his policy was thenceforth directed to the deliverance of Italy from Austrian servitude. In either case the waters of diplomacy would be troubled, and it would be easy to fish out of them something that might partially compensate France for what she lost in 1815. But the truth was that, at his secret interview with Count Cavour, at Plombières, in the autumn of 1858, the Emperor had entered into an engagement to defend Piedmont, if attacked by Austria, and to establish under the Sardinian Crown a Kingdom of Northern Italy, the price for this aid being the cession of Savoy and Nice to France. At this meeting the marriage of Prince Napoleon to the Princess Clothilde, daughter of the King of Italy, was discussed, but not definitely arranged. The announcement of the coming marriage was, however, made to the Queen by the French Emperor on the 31st of December, 1858. On the 23rd of January, 1859, the formal request for the Princess Clothilde’s hand was made. On the 30th the wedding was celebrated, and on the 3rd of February the Prince and Princess Napoleon returned to Paris. On the evening before the marriage, Napoleon III. was said to have signed a pacte de famille, promising aid offensive and defensive to Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel pledging himself to cede to France Savoy and Nice, in return for territorial acquisitions in Lombardy.[36] Thus the French Emperor was bound to Sardinia as with “hoops of steel,” when the European crisis in 1859 became acute, and Lord Malmesbury imagined that he could compose it by diplomacy.