The Queen's artistic tastes, in addition to her fresh sympathies and her affection for her uncle and his wife, rendered the whole scene delightful to her. She was fitted to relish each detail, from the carillons to the carvings. She inspected all that was to be seen at Bruges, from the Palace of Justice to the Chapel of the Holy Blood. At Ghent, she went to the church of St. Bavon, where the Van Eycks have left the best part of their wonderful picture before the altar while the dust of Hubert and Margaret, rests in the crypt below. She saw the fragment of the palace in which John of Gaunt was born, when an English queen-consort, Philippa, resided there five hundred years before. She visited the old Beguinage, with the shadowlike figures of the nuns in black and white flitting to and fro.
From Ostend the Queen and Prince Albert proceeded to the cheerful, prosperous, and, by comparison, modern town of Brussels, King Leopold's capital, and stayed a night at his palace of Lacken, which had been built by Prince Albert's ancestor and namesake, Duke Albert of Sechsen, when he governed the Netherlands along with his wife the Archduchess Christina, the favourite daughter of Maria Theresa and the sister of Marie Antoinette. From Brussels the travellers journeyed to Antwerp, where they saw another grand cathedral and witnessed the antique spectacle of "the Giant" before the palace in the Place de Mer.
On leaving Antwerp, the Queen and the Prince sailed for England, escorted so far on their way by King Leopold and Queen Louise. "It was such a joy to me," her Majesty wrote to her uncle, soon after their parting, "to be once again under the roof of one who has ever been a father to me." The vessel lay all night in Margate Roads, and the next morning arrived at Woolwich.
In the month of October her Majesty and the Prince visited Cambridge, where he received his degree of LL.D. A witty letter, written by Professor Sedgwick, describing the royal visit to the Woodwardian Museum, is quoted by Sir Theodore Martin
"….I received a formidable note from our master telling me of an intended royal visit to the Woodwardian den of wild beasts, immediately after Prince Albert's degree; and enjoining me to clear a passage by the side entrance through the old divinity schools. This threw me off my balance, for since the building of the new library this place of ancient theological disputation has been converted into a kind of lumber-room, and was filled from end to end with every kind of unclean things—mops, slop-pails, chimney-pots, ladders, broken benches, rejected broken cabinets, two long ladders, and an old rusty scythe were the things that met the eye, and all covered with half an inch of venerable dust. There is at the end of the room a kind of gallery or gangway, by which the undergraduates used to find their way to my lecture-room, but this was also full of every kind of rubbish and abomination. We did our best; soon tumbled all impediments into the area below, spread huge mats over the slop-pails, and, in a time incredibly short, a goodly red carpet was spread along the gangway, and thence down my lecture-room to the door of the Museum. But still there was a dreadful evil to encounter. What we had done brought out such a rank compound of villanous smells that even my plebeian nose was sorely put to it; so I went to a chemist's, procured certain bottles of sweet odours, and sprinkled them cunningly where most wanted.
"Inside the Museum all was previously in order, and inside the entrance door from the gangway was a huge picture of the Megatherium, under which the Queen must pass to the Museum, and at that place I was to receive her Majesty. So I dusted my outer garments and ran to the Senate House, and I was just in time to see the Prince take his degree and join in the acclamations. This ended, I ran back to the feet of the Megatherium, and in a few minutes the royal party entered the mysterious gangway above described. They halted, I half thought in a spirit of mischief, to contemplate the furniture of the schools, and the Vice-chancellor (Whewell) pointed out the beauties of the dirty spot where Queen Bess had sat two hundred and fifty years before, when she presided at the Divinity Act. A few steps more brought them under the feet of the, Megatherium. I bowed as low as my anatomy would let me, and the Queen and Prince bowed again most graciously, and so began act first. The Queen seemed happy and well pleased, and was mightily taken with one or two of my monsters, especially with the 'Plesiosaurus,' and a gigantic stag. The subject was new to her; but the Prince evidently had a good general knowledge of the old world, and not only asked good questions and listened with great courtesy to all I had to say, but in one or two instances helped me on by pointing to the rare things in my collection, especially in that part of it which contains the German fossils. I thought myself very fortunate in being able to exhibit the finest collection of German fossils to be seen in England. They fairly went the round of the Museum, neither of them seemed in a hurry, and the Queen was quite happy to hear her husband talk about a novel subject with so much knowledge and spirit. He called her back once or twice to look at a fine impression of a dragon-fly which I have in the Solenhope slate. Having glanced at the long succession of our fossils, from the youngest to the oldest, the party again moved into the lecture-room. The Queen was again mightily taken with the long neck of the Plesiosaurus; under it was a fine head of an Ichthyosaurus which I had just been unpacking. I did not know anything about it, as I had myself never seen its face before, for it arrived in my absence. The Queen asked what it was. I told her as plainly as I could. She then asked whence it came; and what do you think I said? That I did not know the exact place, but I believed it came as a delegate from the monsters of the lower world to greet her Majesty on her arrival at the University. I did not repeat this till I found that I had been overheard, and that my impertinence had been talked of among my Cambridge friends. All was, however, taken in good part, and soon afterwards the royal party again approached the mysterious gangway. The Queen and Prince bowed, the Megatherium packed up his legs close under the abdominal region of his august body, the royal pageant passed under, and was soon out of my sight and welcomed by the cheers of the multitude before the library.
"I will only add that I went through every kind of backward movement to admiration of all beholders, only having once trodden on the hinder part of my cassock, and never once having fallen during my retrogradations before the face of the Queen. In short, had I been a king crab, I could not have walked backwards better."
When in Cambridgeshire the Queen and the Prince visited Lord Hardwicke at
Wimpole, where the whole county was assembled at a ball, and Earl De la
Warr at Bourne.
In this month of October the great agitator for the repeal of the Irish Union, Daniel O'Connell, was arrested, in company with other Irish agitators, on a charge of sedition and conspiracy. After a prolonged trial, which lasted to the early summer of the following year, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and the payment of a fine of two thousand pounds, with recognisances to keep the peace for seven years. The sentence lapsed on technical grounds, but its moral effect was considerable.
In the month of September the Queen and Prince Albert visited Sir Robert Peel at Drayton, travelling by railroad, with every station they passed thronged by spectators. At Rugby the pupils of the great school, headed by Dr. Tait, were drawn up on the platform. Sir Robert Peel received his guests in a pavilion erected for the occasion, and conducted her Majesty to her carriage, round which was an escort of Staffordshire yeomanry. At the entrance to the town of Tamworth, the mayor, kneeling, presented his mace, with the words, "I deliver to your Majesty the mace;" to which the Queen replied, "Take it, it cannot be in better hands."