STAY AT HOLYROOD—DEATHS OF PRINCESS HOHENLOHE AND OF PRINCE FREDERICK OF DARMSTADT—MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH.
The Queen arrived at Holyrood on the 14th of August, and made a stay of a few days in Edinburgh for the first time during eleven years. A suite of rooms called the "Argyle rooms" had been freshly arranged for her occupation. She went over Queen Mary's rooms again for the gratification of Princess Beatrice, and with the Princess and Prince Leopold took the old drives to Dalkeith and Leith which her Majesty had first taken thirty years before.
A favourite project in the past had been that her Majesty should go so far north as to visit Dunrobin, and rooms had been prepared for her reception. When the visit was paid the castle was in the hands of another generation, and the Queen laid the foundation stone of a cross erected to the memory of the late Duchess.
Soon after her Majesty's return to Balmoral, on the 23rd September, she had the grief to receive a telegram announcing the death of her sister, Princess Hohenlohe. Though not more than sixty-five years of age the Princess had been for some time very infirm. She had received a great shock in the previous spring from the unexpected death by fever, at the age of thirty-three, of her younger surviving daughter, Princess Feodore, the second wife of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen.
The Emperor Napoleon III, who had long been labouring under sore disease, laid down his wearied and vanquished life at Chislehurst on the 9th of January, 1873.
The coming marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh to the Grand Duchess
Marie of Russia was announced to Parliament.
On the 2nd of April the Queen was present at the opening of the
Victoria Park. Prince Arthur was created Duke of Connaught.
A fatal accident to the younger son of Prince and Princess Louis of Hesse happened at Darmstadt on the 29th of May. The nurse had brought the children to see the Princess while she was in bed, and had left the two little boys playing beside her. The windows of the bedroom and of a dressing-room beyond were open. Princess Louis, hearing Prince Ernest, the elder brother, go into the dressing-room, leapt out of bed and hurried after him. In her momentary absence Prince Frederick, between two and three years of age, leant out of one of the bedroom windows, lost his balance, and fell on the pavement below, receiving terrible injuries, from which he died in a few hours, to the great sorrow of his parents.
In September the Queen and Princess Beatrice, with Lady Churchill and General Ponsonby, spent a week at Inverlochy, occupying the house of Lord Abinger at the foot of Ben Nevis, among the beautiful scenery which borders the Caledonian Canal, and is specially associated with Prince Charlie—in pity for whom her Majesty loved to recall the drops of Stewart blood in her veins.
This year more than one figure, well-known in different ways to the
Queen in former years, passed out of mortal sight—Bishop Wilberforce,
Landseer, Macready.