All the more valuable paintings had been removed long ago to Windsor, but many curious pictures still remained on the walls of presence chambers and galleries, kings' and queens' great dining-rooms and drawing-rooms, staircases and closets. Did the pictures serve as illustrations to the history lessons? Was the inspection made the recreation of rainy days, when the great suites of State-rooms in which Courts were no longer held or banquets celebrated, but which still echoed with the remembered tread of kings' and courtiers' feet, must have appeared doubly deserted and forlorn?
What was known as the King's Great Drawing-room was not far from the Duchess of Kent's rooms, and was, in fact, put at her disposal in its dismantled, ghostly condition. Among its pictures—freely attributed to many schools and masters—including several battle-pieces and many portraits, there were three representations of English palaces: old Greenwich, where Elizabeth was born; old Hampton, dear to William and Mary; and Windsor, the Windsor of George III. and Queen Charlotte, the Princess's grandfather and grandmother. In the next room, amidst classic and scriptural subjects, and endless examples of "ladies with ruffs," "heads in turbans," &c., there were occasionally family portraits—the old King and Queen more than once; William, Duke of Gloucester; the Queen of Wurtemberg as the girl-Princess Royal, with a dog. (She died in Wurtemberg about this time, 1828. She had quitted England on her marriage in 1797, and in the thirty-one years of her married life only once came back, as an aging and ailing woman. She proved a good wife and stepmother.) A youthful family group of an earlier generation was sure to attract a child—George III. and his brother, Edward, Duke of York, when young, shooting at a target, the Duke of Gloucester in petticoats, Princess Augusta (Duchess of Brunswick, and mother of Caroline, Princess of Wales) nursing the Duke of Cumberland, and Princess Louisa sitting in a chaise drawn by a favourite dog, the scene in Kew Gardens, painted in 1746. Queen Elizabeth was there as a child aged seven, A.D. 1540—three-quarters, with a feather-fan in her hand. Did the guide of the little unconscious Princess pause inadvertently, with a little catch of the breath, by words arrested on the tip of the tongue, before that picture? And was he or she inevitably arrested again before another picture of Queen Elizabeth in her prime, returning from her palace, wearing her crown and holding the sceptre and the globe; Juno, Pallas, and Venus flying before her, Juno dropping her sceptre, Venus her roses, and the little boy Cupid flinging away his bow and arrows, and clinging in discomfiture to his mother because good Queen Bess had conquered all the three in power, wisdom, and beauty? We know the Princess must have loved to look at the pictures. More curious than beautiful as they were, they may have been sufficient to foster in her that love of art which has been the delight of the Queen's maturer years.
English princesses, even though they were not queens in perspective, were not so plentiful in Queen Victoria's young days as to leave any doubt of their hands and hearts proving in great request when the proper time came. Therefore there was no necessity to hold before the little girl, as an incentive to good penmanship, the example of her excellent grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who wrote so fair a letter, expressed with such correctness and judiciousness, at the early age of fifteen, that when the said letter fell, by an extraordinary train of circumstances, into the hands of young King George, he determined there and then to make that painstaking and sensible Princess, and no other, a happy wife and great Queen. There was no strict need for the story, and yet as a gentle stimulant it may have been administered.
Queen Victoria was educated, as far as possible, in the simple habits and familiarity with nature which belongs to the best and happiest training of any child, whatever her rank. There is a pleasant picture in Knight's "Passages of a Working Life": "I delighted to walk in Kensington Gardens in the early summer, on my way to town…. In such a season, when the sun was scarcely high enough to have dried up the dews of Kensington's green alleys, as I passed along the broad central walk I saw a group on the lawn before the palace, which, to my mind, was a vision of exquisite loveliness. The Duchess of Kent and her daughter, whose years then numbered nine, are breakfasting in the open air, a single page attending on them at a respectful distance, the mother looking on with eyes of love, while the fair, soft, English face is bright with smiles. The world of fashion is not yet astir. Clerks and mechanics passing onwards to their occupations are few, and they exhibit nothing of vulgar curiosity."
We have another charming description, by Leigh Hunt, of a glimpse which he had of Princess Victoria in these gardens: "We remember well the peculiar kind of personal pleasure which it gave us to see the future Queen, the first time we ever did see her, coming up a cross-path from the Bayswater Gate, with a girl of her own age by her side, whose hand she was holding as if she loved her. It brought to our minds the warmth of our own juvenile friendships, and made us fancy that she loved everything else that we had loved in like measure—books, trees, verses, Arabian tales, and the good mother who had helped to make her so affectionate. A magnificent footman in scarlet came behind her, with the splendidest pair of calves, in white stockings, that we ever beheld. He looked somehow like a gigantic fairy, personating for his little lady's sake the grandest kind of footman he could think of; and his calves he seemed to have made out of a couple of the biggest chaise-lamps in the possession of the godmother of Cinderella. With or without her big footman, the little Princess could have rambled safely in the grounds which her predecessors had made for her, could have fed the ducks which swam in the round pond before her palace windows, could have drunk from the curious little mineral well, where, in Miss Thackeray's 'Old Kensington,' Frank Raban met Dolly Vanburgh, or peeped out of the little side gate where the same Dolly came face to face with the culprits George and Rhoda. The future owner of all could have easily strayed down the alleys among the Dutch elms which King William brought, perhaps saplings, from the Boomjees, as far as the oak that tradition says King Charles set in the form of an acorn taken from his leafy refuge at Boscobel."
The Duke of Kent had brought an old soldier-servant, called Stillman, and established him, with his wife and family, in a cottage in one of the Kensington lanes. It is said the Duke had recommended this former retainer to the care of the Duchess, and that she and her daughter were in the habit of visiting and caring for the family, in which there were a sickly little boy and girl.
An event happened in 1828 to the household in Kensington Palace which was of importance to all. It was a joyful event, and the preparations for the royal wedding, with the gala in which the preliminaries culminated, must have formed an era in the quiet young life into which a startling announcement and its fulfilment had broken, filling the hours of the short winter days with wonder, admiration, and interest.
Yet all the pleasant stir and excitement; the new member of the family prominent for a brief space; the gifts, the trousseau, the wedding-cake, the wedding guests, were but the deceptive herald of change and loss to the family, whose members were so few that each became deeply precious. The closely united circle was to be broken, and a dear face permanently withdrawn from the group. The Duchess of Kent's elder daughter, Princess Victoria's only sister, was about to marry. It was the most natural and the happiest course, above all when the Princess Feodora wedded worthily—how worthily let the subsequent testimony of the Queen and the Prince Consort prove. It was given at the time of the Prince of Hohenlohe's death, thirty-two years afterwards, in 1860.
The Queen wrote to her own and her sister's uncle, the King of the Belgians, in reference to the Prince of Hohenlohe: "A better, more thoroughly straightforward, upright, and excellent man, with a more unblemished character, or a more really devoted and faithful husband, never existed."
The Prince Consort's opinion of his brother-in-law is to be found in a letter to the Princess William of Prussia: "Poor Ernest Hohenlohe is a great loss. Though he was not a man of great powers of mind, capable of taking comprehensive views of the world, still he was a great character —that is to say, a thoroughly good, noble, spotless, and honourable man, which in these days forms a better title to be recognised as great than do craftiness, Machiavellism, and grasping ambition."