[201] Fortnightly Review, May, 1884.
[202] The Claremont Estate was bought by the Crown in 1816. It was granted to the lamented Princess Charlotte and her husband, Prince Leopold—the Queen’s uncle—with benefit of survivorship. It was a place full of gloomy associations, but Prince Leopold kept it up pretty well till 1848, on the £60,000 a year which he had from the nation. In 1848 the exiled Orleans family occupied it, and were prodigal in spending money in improving the grounds and gardens, which were almost as productive as those of Frogmore. On the death of King Leopold of Belgium, Claremont reverted to the Crown, and Lord John Russell and Mr. Gladstone passed an Act granting it to the Queen for life. In 1881 Sir Henry Ponsonby, as trustee for the Queen, bought the reversionary interest of it for her from the State for £70,000, and since then it has been her private property, like Osborne and Balmoral. That Claremont is the property of the nation is a strange delusion fondly cherished by many critics of Royalty.
[203] Prince Leopold lived chiefly at Boyton Manor from the summer of 1875 till the autumn of 1879, when the Queen insisted on his going to Claremont. It was at Boyton that he was so dangerously ill in 1877 that Sir William Jenner telegraphed for the Queen to come to what was supposed to be his deathbed. After that her Majesty always objected to his staying in Wiltshire.
[204] The borough franchises of England and Wales were the old £20 clear annual value qualification of 1832, and the householder and lodger franchises established in 1867. To these the new Reform Act of 1885 added the “service franchise,” giving a vote to any man who inhabits any dwelling-house by virtue of any office, service, or employment. Caretakers, bailiffs, gamekeepers, officers of public establishments, shepherds, &c., were admitted under this qualification. It was further provided that every citizen of full age, and not subject to legal incapacity, who has occupied a house for a year and paid his rates, can have his name registered as a voter for the district, whether it be called county or borough, in which he resides. The property franchises in the counties were in the main left untouched, but provision was made to check multiplication of faggot votes—i.e., votes of non-resident occupiers on sham qualifications. But four-fifths of the 5,000,000 electors enfranchised by the Bill were really qualified as simple householders in town and county.
[205] There were 56 two-member constituencies wholly disfranchised, and 31 which lost a member apiece. But by Mr. Gladstone’s Bill in 1885, there were 160 seats set free for redistribution, 6 that were in abeyance were revived, and to meet the claim of Scotland for increased representation, 12 new seats, despite the opposition of the extreme Tories like Sir J. D. Hay, were added to the House.
[206] Of this £11,000,000, it must be said £4,500,000 were to pay for Egyptian expeditions and £6,500,000 for “special preparations.”
[207] M. Lessar, the Central Asian geographer, was now in attendance at the Russian Embassy as an expert.
[208] See Speeches of Lord Randolph Churchill (Authorised Edition), edited by Henry W. Lucy (George Routledge and Sons: London, 1885, p. 220).
[209] As a matter of fact it was weaker than it should have been, but this was due to the neglect of shipbuilding by Mr. W. H. Smith, whose favourite policy was to make old ships do for new ones by patching their boilers. Lord Northbrook had pushed on shipbuilding, and made up leeway so that in first-class ironclads the country was more than a match for France. But much had still to be done in other directions—e.g., in providing vessels for scouting, and for torpedo warfare. The armament of the Navy was also obsolete, in fact, when Mr. Smith handed the Navy over to Lord Northbrook, there was not a single big breech-loading gun mounted in the Fleet.
[210] Whilst the anti-Coercionists in the Cabinet (Sir Charles Dilke, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre) were struggling with the Coercionists, the subterranean arrangements between the Tories and Parnellites were also publicly ratified in a speech delivered by Lord Randolph Churchill at the St. Stephen’s Club, in which, amidst ringing cheers, he condemned the renewal of Coercion. Signs of disorder in Ireland, he argued, had passed away, and such being the case Government was bound by “the highest considerations of public policy and Constitutional doctrine to return to and rely on the ordinary law. They were all the more strongly bound at that time because they had just enfranchised the Irish people, and declared them capable citizens fit to take part in the government of the Empire.”—The Parnell Movement, by T. P. O’Connor, Chap. XIII.