The next day the royal party, starting as early as nine on a hazy morning, reached Stirling and visited the castle, which figures so largely in the lives of the old Stewart kings. The Queen saw the room in which James II. slew Douglas, John Knox's pulpit, the field of Bannockburn, which saved Scotland from a conquest, and the Knoll or "Knowe" where the Scotch Queens and the Court ladies sat to look down on their knights "Riding the Ring" or playing at the boisterously boyish game of "Hurleyhacket." But the autumn mists shut out the "Highland hills," already receding in the background, and the Links of Forth, where the river winds like the meshes of a chain through the fertile lowlands to the sea. Soon Drummond Castle and Taymouth, with their lochs and mountains and "plaided array," would be like a wonderful dream, to be often recalled and recounted at Windsor and Buckingham Palace.
From Stirling the Queen travelled back to Dalkeith, where she arrived the same night. During her Majesty's last day in Scotland, which she expressed herself as "very sorry to leave," she drove to Roslin Chapel, where twenty "barons bold" of the house of St. Clair wear shirts of mail for shrouds, then went on to storied Hawthornden—a wooded nest hung high over the water, where the poet Drummond entertained his English brother-of-the-pen, Ben Jonson.
On Thursday, the 15th of September, the Queen embarked in the Trident, a large steamboat, likely to be swifter than the Royal George, and surrounded by the flotilla, which, with the exception of one, fell behind, and out of sight in the course of the voyage, sailed for England, past Berwick Law, Tantallon, the ruined keep of the Douglases, and the Bass, where a gloomy state prison once frowned on a rock, now given up to seagulls and Solan geese. The weather was favourable and the moonlight fine. The voyage became enjoyable as the young couple ate a "pleasant little dinner on deck in a tent, made of flags," or paced the deck in the moonlight, or read the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," and played on the piano in the cabin. Notwithstanding the good time, winds and waves are not to be trusted, and the roar of the guns which announced that the vessel was at the Nore was a welcome awakening at three o'clock on the morning of Saturday, the 17th. The sun smiled through a slight haze on the sail up the river, among the familiar English sights and sounds. The tour, which had delighted the pair, was over; but home, where a loving mother and little children awaited them, was sweet.
CHAPTER XV. A MARRIAGE, A DEATH, AND A BIRTH IN THE ROYAL FAMILY.—A PALACE HOME.
The rest of the autumn and early winter passed in busy quiet and domestic happiness. In November, the Queen honoured the Duke of Wellington by a second visit to Walmer. She was no longer the girl-princess—a solitary figure, but for her devoted mother, she was the Queen-wife, taking with her not only her good and noble husband, but her two fine children, to show her old servant, the great soldier of a former generation, who had known her from her childhood, how rich she had become in all womanly blessings. During her stay her Majesty went to Dover, and included the guardian castle of England, on the chalk cliffs which overlook the coast of France, among the venerable fortresses she had inspected this year.
In the meantime, the agitation for Free Trade was exciting the country in one direction, and O'Connell was thundering for a repeal of the union between England and Ireland in another. On the 20th of January, 1843, a public crime was committed which shocked the whole nation and aroused the utmost sympathy of the Queen and Prince Albert. A half-crazy man named Macnaughten, who conceived he had received a political injury from Sir Robert Peel, planned to waylay and shoot the Premier in Downing Street. The man mistook his victim, and fatally wounded Sir Robert's private secretary, Mr. Drummond, who perished in the room of his chief. The plea of insanity accepted by the jury on the trial was so far set aside by the judges.
The descendants of the numerous family of George III. and Queen Charlotte, in the third generation, only numbered five princes and princesses. Apart from her German kindred, the Queen had only four cousins—her nearest English relations after her uncles and aunts. Of these the Crown Prince of Hanover, German born but English bred as Prince George of Cumberland, and long regarded as, in default of Princess Victoria, the heir to the crown, married at Hanover, on the 18th of February, Princess Mary of Saxe-Altenburg. The Crown Prince was then twenty-four years of age. Though he had no longer any prospect of succeeding to the throne of England, he was the heir to a considerable German kingdom. But the terrible misfortune which had cost him his eyesight did not terminate his hard struggle with fate. His father, whose ambition had been built upon his son from his birth, appeared to have more difficulty in submitting to the sore conditions of the Prince's loss than the Prince himself showed. By a curious self-deception, the King of Hanover never acknowledged his son's blindness, but persisted in treating him, and causing others to treat him, as if he saw. The Queen of Hanover, once a bone of contention at the English Court, and Queen Charlotte's bete noire, as the divorced wife of one of her two husbands prior to her third marriage with the Duke of Cumberland, had died two years before. It was desirable in every light that she should find a successor—a princess—to preside over the widowed Court, and be the mother to the future kings of Hanover, supposing Hanover had remained on the roll of the nations. A fitting choice was made, and the old King took care that the marriage should be celebrated with a splendour worthy of the grandson of a King of England. Twenty-four sovereigns and princes, among them the King of Prussia, graced the ceremony. The bride wore cloth of silver and a profusion of jewels, and whatever further troubles were in store for the blind bridegroom, whose manly fortitude and uprightness of character—albeit these qualities were not without their alloy of pride and obstinacy—won him the respect of his contemporaries, Providence blessed him on that February day with a good, bright, devoted wife.
On the 25th of March, the Thames Tunnel, which at the time was fondly regarded as the very triumph of modern engineering, and a source of the greatest convenience to London, was opened for foot-passengers by a procession of dignitaries and eminent men, including in their ranks the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Inglis, Lord Lincoln, Joseph Hume, Messrs. Babbage and Faraday, &c. &c. The party descended by one staircase, shaft, and archway which carried them to Wapping, and, ascending again, returned by the other archway to Rotherhithe. Some of the Thames watermen hoisted black flags as a sign that they considered their craft doomed.
For the first time since her accession, the Queen had been unable, from the state of her health, to open Parliament or to hold the usual spring levees. Prince Albert relieved her of this, as of so many of her burdens, and Baron Stockmar paid a visit to England, at the Prince's urgent request, that the Baron's sagacity and experience might be brought to bear on what remained of the arduous task of getting a Queen's household into order and directing a royal nursery. The care of the Queen's Privy Purse had been transferred to the Prince on the departure of Baroness Lehzen. These various obligations, together with his rapidly increasing interest in public affairs, and the number of persons who claimed his attention, especially when he was in London, become a serious tax on his strength, a tax which the Queen even at this early date feared and sought to guard against. Baron Stockmar was greatly pleased with the aspect of the family. He proudly proclaimed that the Prince was quickly showing what was in him, among other things that he was rich in that very practical talent in which the Baron had feared the young man might be deficient; at the same time the old family friend remarked that the Prince, in the midst of his industry and happiness, frequently looked "pale, worried, and weary."
An instance of Prince Albert's cordial interest in the welfare of the humbler ranks is to be found in one of Bishop Wilberforce's letters, dated March, 1843: "After breakfast with the Prince, for three-quarters of an hour talked about Sunday. Told him that I thought 'Book of Sports' did more than anything to shock the English mind. He urged want of amusements for common people of an innocent class—no gardens. In Coburg, with ten thousand inhabitants, thirty-two gardens, frequented by different sorts of people, who meet and associate in them. 'I never heard a real shout in England. All my servants marry because they say it is so dull here, nothing to interest-good living, good wine, but there is nothing to do but turn rogue or marry.'"