Count Vitzthum, however, puts the matter beyond doubt. Writing in 1861, he says:—“The secret agreement between the Conservatives and Palmerston, which had checked the barren Party contest of the previous year, was renewed before the Session began, and even received the secret sanction of the Court. After Lord Palmerston, in January, had submitted to the Queen and Prince Albert his programme for the current year, and had promised in particular his vigorous prosecution of the works for national defence, Disraeli was invited to Windsor. The Prince, to his no small satisfaction, received the assurance from the leader of the Opposition that the Tories, though three hundred strong, had no thoughts of undertaking the Government, so long as Palmerston continued to safeguard the Conservative interests of the State. Disraeli added that it rested only with the present Prime Minister to exercise a power such as none of his predecessors had wielded since Pitt.”[93] Finally, conclusive proof of the existence of the alliance is given by the highest living authority on such a matter—namely, Sir Theodore Martin—who discloses details of the whole transaction. Sixty members of the House of Commons had apparently pledged themselves to follow Mr. Cobden’s policy of “democratic finance,” which was to lessen expenditure by reducing armaments. Palmerston’s Government was therefore doomed unless an alliance could be struck up with the Tories. According to the Prince Consort, Mr. Disraeli said that “the Conservative party was ready not only to give general support to a steady and patriotic policy, but even to help the Minister out of scrapes if he got into any.” But, in return, they must, to use Sir Theodore Martin’s words, “state explicitly the principles of their policy, and not enter into a line of what he (Mr. Disraeli) termed democratic finance.”[94] When Mr. Ashley stated that Lord Palmerston was “too loyal to enter into any such secret understanding,” he must have neglected to read the letter dated 24th of January, 1861, which the Prince Consort sent to Lord Palmerston, embodying the terms of the understanding in question. It is also possible that he did not anticipate the publication of Lord Malmesbury’s diary, in which, under date the 14th of March, 1861, there is the following entry:—“The House of Commons threw out Mr. Locke-King’s Bill for reducing the county franchise to £10, by a majority of 28. We had agreed with the Government that, if they helped us to throw out this Bill, we would help them to pass Lord Palmerston’s Resolution, reversing their former vote on the payment of the Navy.”[95]
On the 4th of February the Queen came to town for the opening of Parliament, which took place on the 5th. The Royal Speech, says Count Vitzthum, “ratified the private agreement (between Palmerston and the Tories) by making no mention of reform. The skirmishes that took place during the
ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, WINDSOR, FROM THE RIVER.
Session had therefore no practical importance, and only served to conceal from the public and the parties themselves the understanding already effected between the leaders.”[96] Very few points for debate were raised by the Queen’s Speech. Peace in Europe, it was suggested, could be preserved by the moderation of the Powers. Syria would soon be pacified, and thankfulness was expressed at the success of British arms in China. A sympathetic allusion to the Civil War in America, was prettily pointed by a reference to the kindly welcome which the Prince of Wales had received in the United States, and the loyalty of the Canadians was frankly recognised. Crime, bankruptcy, land transfer, and rating were the subjects suggested for legislation. The debate on the Address in both Houses was insincere. Lord Derby made fun of the Government for coquetting with revolution in Italy, and he ridiculed Lord John Russell’s inconsistent despatches to Sir James Hudson. “Mr. Disraeli,” writes Count Vitzthum, “handled the same theme in an academic fashion in the House of Commons,” but nobody dreamt of seriously assaulting the Ministerial position. “In Italy strange things are taking place. It is still the idol of the two ‘old Italian masters,’” wrote the Prince Consort to Stockmar on the eve of the opening of Parliament.[97] And yet, when Ministers heard that Cavour had allowed arms to be shipped from the arsenal at Genoa for the conspirators who were organising an insurrection in Turkey, they became a little uneasy. No harm, however, came of this, because the Turkish authorities at Constantinople being forewarned, seized the arms when they arrived. But the problem of problems was, what did Napoleon mean to do in Italy? He had opened the French Chambers with a speech which, describing the annexation of Savoy as an act done in maintenance of the natural rights of France, created a panic among the Palmerstonians and their Tory allies. If Savoy—why not Belgium? was the question which this doctrine of natural rights suggested to men’s minds. And yet at this time Napoleon’s power was vastly exaggerated. The priests, who had not forgiven him for enriching Italy at the expense of the Pope, condemned his policy from their pulpits. The vulgar luxury and swindling speculations in which the Imperial entourage indulged, disgusted the educated classes. It was at this time that those who had hailed the Emperor as the “saviour of Society” began to call him “Badinguet”—after the bricklayer whose disguise he had borrowed when escaping from Ham. At one time Palmerston and Russell imagined they had discovered the solution of the most pressing of the Italian problems. They thought—or rather the Emperor of the French persuaded them to think—that Austria might sell Venetia to Sardinia, and whilst retaining half the purchase price to relieve her strained finances, with the other half buy Bosnia and the Herzegovina from the Sultan, who was also in lack of money. The Queen thwarted this cunning scheme, when Lord John Russell broached it in the end of December, by pointing out that to suggest the sale of Venetia to Sardinia, was to record an official opinion that Venetia ought to be in some way freed from Austrian rule. In the event of Austria refusing to sell the province this would be used as a justification for wresting Venetia from her, or for compelling England to press her to give it up. Palmerston himself came round to this view, and so the Venetian question was for a time eliminated. But in Italy it soon became clear that France meant to give Victor Emmanuel freedom to act. Gaeta surrendered in February when the French fleet was withdrawn—the King and Queen of Naples being conveyed to Rome. They sought refuge there under the protection of French bayonets, in the cheerless shelter of the empty Farnese Palace. Five days after the fall of Gaeta Victor Emmanuel summoned the first Italian Parliament to Turin, where it met in a large wooden hall improvised for the occasion. In his speech from the throne he regretted the recall of the French Minister, but did not pretend to be downcast by the platonic rebuke of France. As to the protest of Prussia against his policy, Victor Emmanuel said an ambassador had been sent to King William “in token of respect for him personally, and of sympathy with the noble German nation,” which he hoped would become convinced that Italian unity could not prejudice the rights of other states. The meaning of this reference in the speech was pointed out by De la Marmora. He cynically told the Prussian Government at Berlin, that Italy consoled herself with the thought that she had set an example which Prussia, in spite of her protests, would find useful “in conquering the hegemony of Germany.” On the 17th of March the Turin Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, and two days afterwards England recognised his position. France delayed her recognition till June, Napoleon’s chief difficulty being the disposal of Rome. Opportunity, said Italian statesmen, will open the way to Venice; and as for Rome, though it must be the capital of free Italy, we only desire to go there, not at the head of a revolutionary army, but hand in hand with France. Personally, Napoleon would have wished to evacuate Rome. Its occupation was a heavy burden on his finances—which had become seriously embarrassed. To uphold the temporal power of the Pope, which he had disavowed, against the will of the Italian people, which in other quarters he had enforced by the sword, put him in a false position. On the other hand, the priests in France had to be conciliated, and there was a strong party among Frenchmen who thought that France should be compensated, by the occupation of Rome, for the rise of a new naval Power in the Mediterranean.[98] Early in the summer Cavour, who like Themistocles lived to convert a small state into a great one, died—his policy being cherished as a sacred legacy by his successor, Riccasoli. Cavour, however, lived long enough to see the failure of an intrigue to procure the evacuation of Rome by the cession of Sardinia to France. Mr. Kinglake in July tried to convince the House of Commons that this cession was practically agreed on, and he pointed out that Nelson had declared Malta would be useless to England whenever the Bay of Cagliari passed into the hands of a great naval power. But Lord John Russell—in the last speech he ever made in the Lower House—assured the country that he could find no evidence pointing to the existence of such a scheme. At the same time he made it plain, though he did not say so in as many words, that England would regard the cession of Sardinia to France as a casus belli.[99]
Another project was on foot which gave the Queen great uneasiness. Napoleon—whose brain, said Lord Palmerston once, was as full of schemes as a warren was full of rabbits—was said to be in favour of creating a new Eastern State or kingdom, with Constantinople as its capital, and King Leopold, the Queen’s uncle, as its Sovereign. In that case France would naturally take Belgium by way of compensation; but the idea, if ever seriously entertained, was soon consigned to the limbo of vanished Imperial dreams. The condition of Austria was now rather serious. All her proposals for reforming the political system of Hungary, relegated that ancient kingdom to the position of an Austrian province. The Hungarian people, however, refused to accept this position, and demanded the restoration of their rights as an independent State under the Sovereign of Austria, reigning over them as crowned King of Hungary. Their demand might at any moment take the form of a revolutionary movement, which would probably re-open the Eastern question, and involve England in war. Luckily this calamity was averted by the preoccupation of Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel, who alone had either the power or the will to raise a revolution in Hungary.
But affairs in the North were much more disquieting. Early in March the dispute between Denmark and the Duchies of Sleswig-Holstein, which the Queen and her husband had watched with jealous eyes from its origin, became acute. The Danish Government was willing to submit the budget for the Duchies to their local legislatures, on condition that it was not altered. The German Diet or Bund declared that this was equivalent to an assertion that territory which was really subject to the authority of the Bund, was under the exclusive Sovereign authority of Denmark. The three non-German Great Powers declared that Denmark ought to yield to the Duchies their constitutional rights, and laid it down that if this were not done, the German Bund might justly force concessions from Denmark, by Federal execution in Sleswig-Holstein. Denmark ignored the award and threats of the Powers, and Prussia took up the cause of the Sleswigers. In England the Prussian Government was sneered at for menacing Denmark because she denied the Duchies the right to control their Budgets, whilst it raised money for its own military purposes without the consent of its own subjects.
Other than political anxieties made the spring of 1861 dismal to the Queen. On the 12th of March she had visited her mother, the Duchess of Kent, at Frogmore, and found her suffering great pain from the effects of a surgical operation which had been performed to relieve an abscess in her arm. On the 15th Her Majesty and her husband were inspecting the Horticultural Society’s gardens at South Kensington, when they were summoned by Sir James Clark to the bedside of the Duchess of Kent, who began to develop feverish symptoms. When they arrived they found her dying. “I knelt before her,” writes the Queen, “kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me.... I went out to sob,” adds Her Majesty, stricken to the heart at finding, for the first time in her life, her mother had not received her with a loving smile of recognition. All through the night the Queen watched by the bedside of the dying Princess, weeping as she thought of her childhood and its sacred memories, and of the dreadful blank her mother’s death must make in her life. At eight in the morning of the next day (the 16th) Prince Albert persuaded the Queen to leave her mother’s room for a little, and rest. But she could not rest. She insisted on returning to the sick-room, and when she went back she saw that her mother was passing away. The heart-beats grew fainter; the eyes slowly closed, and as the clock struck half-past nine, Prince Albert took the Queen out of the room, and she knew all was over. For forty-one years she had not been parted from her mother save for a few brief weeks at a time. Now they were parted for ever on this side of the grave. “I seemed,” she writes, “to have lived through a life, to have become old.” The death of the Duchess of Kent plunged the Royal household in grief. She died leaving not one dry eye behind her among those who had known and served and loved her. The Princess Frederick William of Prussia hurried to her mother’s side, arriving at Windsor on the 18th; and then from every quarter, letters and messages of condolence came pouring in. Addresses of sympathy were carried in both Houses of Parliament, and every effort was made by Ministers to lighten the anxieties of the Queen at a time when sorrow lay heavily on her heart. The funeral took place on the 25th, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the body was laid till a mausoleum at Frogmore could be built. “I and my girls,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold on that day, “prayed at home together, and dwelt on her happiness and peace.” On the 2nd of April the Princess Frederick William returned to Berlin, and the Queen and her husband retired to Osborne. The Easter recess had produced a lull in politics, and it might have been expected that the Queen would have been permitted to mourn her bereavement in peace. It was not so. On the 12th of April she was deeply pained to find the Times renewing its old attacks on Prince Albert, and again accusing him of thwarting Lord Palmerston’s Italian policy in the interests of his German relatives. For this cruel imputation there was no warrant, save the fact that Austria persisted in holding Venetia, which had been guaranteed to her by the pact of Villafranca, in spite of Lord Palmerston’s recommendation that she should cede the province to Italy.