The whole court of Gotha was assembled to see Prince Albert get the Garter; a hundred and one guns were fired to commemorate the auspicious occasion. The younger Perthes, under whom the Prince had studied at Bonn, wrote of the event, "The Grand-ducal papa bound the Garter round his boy's knee amidst the roar of a hundred and one cannon" (the attaching of the Garter, however, was done, not by Prince Albert's father, but by the Queen's brother, the Prince of Leiningen, another Knight of the Order). "The earnestness and gravity with which the Prince has obeyed this early call to take a European position, give him dignity and standing in spite of his youth, and increase the charm of his whole aspect."
The investiture was followed by a grand dinner, when the Duke proposed the Queen's health, which was drunk by all the company standing, accompanied by several distinct flourishes of trumpets, the band playing "God save the Queen," and the artillery outside firing a royal salute. Already the Prince had written to the Queen, when the marriage was officially declared at Coburg, that the day had affected him very much, so many emotions had filled his heart. Her health had been drunk at dinner "with a tempest of huzzas." The joy of the people had been so great that they had gone on firing in the streets, with guns and pistols, during the whole night, so that one might have imagined a battle was going on. This was a repetition of that earlier festival, only rendered more emphatic and with a touch of pathos added to it by the impending departure of Prince Albert, to lay hold of his high destiny. The leave-takings were earnest and prolonged, with many pretty slightly fantastic German ceremonies, and must have been hard upon a man whose affections were so tender and tenacious. Especially painful was the farewell to his mother's mother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, who had partly reared the princely lad. She was much attached to him, and naturally saw him go with little hope of their meeting again in this world.
The Prince was accompanied by his father and brother, with various friends in their train, who, after the celebration of the marriage, were to return to Germany. But Prince Albert carried with him—to remain in his near neighbourhood—two old allies, whose familiar faces would be doubly welcome in a foreign country. The one was his Swiss valet, Cart, a faithful, devoted servant, "the best of nurses," who, had waited on his master since the latter was a boy of seven years of age. The other was the beautiful greyhound, Eos, jet black with the exception of a narrow white streak on the nose and a white foot. Her master had got her as a puppy of six weeks old, when he was a boy in his fourteenth year, and had trained the loving, graceful creature in all imaginable canine, sagacity and cleverness. She had been the constant companion of his youth. She had already come to England with him, on the decisive visit of the previous autumn, and was known and dear to his royal mistress.
It was severe wintry weather when the great cavalcade, in eight travelling carriages, set out for England, and took its way across Germany, Belgium, and the north of France, to the coast The whole journey assumed much of the character of a festive procession. At each halting-place crowds turned out to do the princes honour. Every court and governing body welcomed them with demonstrations of respect and rejoicing. But at Aix-la-Chapelle, in a newspaper which he came across, Prince Albert read the debates and votes in the Houses of Parliament that cut down the ordinary annuity of the English sovereign's consort, and left unsettled the question of his position in the country. The first disappointment told in two ways. Young and sensitive—though he was also resolute and cheerful-minded—he had been a little nervous beforehand about the reception which might be accorded to him in England; he now received a painful impression that the marriage was not popular with the people. He had indulged in generous dreams of the assistance and encouragement which he would be able to bestow on men of letters and artists, when he suddenly found his resources curtailed to nearly half the amount he had been warranted in counting upon. However, at Brussels, the next halting-place, in writing to the Queen, and frankly admitting his mortification at the words and acts of the majority of the members of both English Houses of Parliament, he could add with perfect sincerity, "All I have time to say is, that while I possess your love they cannot make me unhappy."
And King Leopold was there with his sensible, calming counsel, while Baron Stockmar had been careful to have a letter awaiting the Prince, which explained the undercurrent of political, not personal, motives that had influenced the debates.
In fact, so far from being unpopular, the Prince, who was the Queen's choice, was really the most acceptable of all her suitors in the eyes of her people. The sole serious objection urged against him in those days was that of his youth, a fault which was not only daily lessening, but was speedily forgotten in the conviction of the manly and serious attention to duty on his part which he quickly inspired.
On the 5th of February the party arrived at Calais. Lord Clarence Paget had been sent over with the Firebrand to await their arrival, but the usual difficulties of an adverse tide and an insufficient French harbour presented themselves, and the company had to sail on the morning of the 6th in one of the ordinary Dover packet-boats, under a strong gale from the south-east, with a heavy sea, which rendered the horrors of the Channel crossing, at the worst, what only those who have experienced them can realise.
The Prince, like most natives of inland Germany, had been little inured to sailing, and his constitution rendered him specially liable to sea-sickness. As a lad of seventeen, facing the insidious and repulsive foe for the first time, he had expressed his own and his brother's dread of the unequal encounter. Now he was doomed to feel its ignoble clutch to the last moment. "The Duke had gone below, and on either side of the cabin staircase lay the two princes in an almost helpless state."
It was in such unpropitious circumstances that Prince Albert had to rise, pull himself together, and bow his acknowledgements to the crowds on the pier ready to greet him. Who that has rebelled against the calm superiority of the comfortable; amused onlookers at the haggard, giddy sufferers reeling on shore from the disastrous crossing of a stormy ferry, cannot comprehend the ordeal!
The Prince surmounted it gallantly, anticipating the time when, at the call of work or duty, he was known to rise to any effort, to shake off fatigue and indisposition as if he had been the most muscular of giants, and to make a brave fight to the last against deadly illness. He had his reward. The raw inclement day, the disabling, discomfiting malady—which had appeared in themselves a bad beginning, an inhospitable introduction to his future life—the recent misgivings he had entertained, were all forgotten in the enthusiastic reception he received before he put foot on land. A kind heart responds readily to kindness, and the Prince felt, in spite of parliamentary votes, the people were glad to see him, with an overflowing gladness.