In the course of the next couple of hours, after a thousand feet of the descent had been achieved, by one of those abrupt transitions which belong to such a landscape, the mist below vanished as if by magic, and it was again, summer sunshine around.
But the world could not be altogether shut out at Balmoral, and the echoes which came from afar, this year, were of a sufficiently disturbing character. Among the most notable, Sir Theodore Martin mentions the Frankfort riots, in which two members of the German States Union were assassinated, and the startling death of the Conservative leader, Lord George Bentinck, who had suddenly exchanged the rôle of the turf for that of Parliament, and come to the front during the struggle over the abolition of the Corn Laws.
A third strangely significant omen was the election of Prince Louis
Napoleon, by five different French Departments, as a deputy to the new
French Chamber.
The Court left Balmoral on the 28th of September, stayed one night in London, and then proceeded for ten days to Osborne. On the return of the Queen and the Prince to Windsor, on the 9th of October, a sad accident occurred in their sight. As the yacht was crossing on a misty and stormy day to Portsmouth, she passed near the frigate Grampus, which had just come back from her station in the Pacific. In their eagerness to meet their relations among the crew on board, five unfortunate women had gone out in an open boat rowed by two watermen, though the foul-weather flag was flying. "A sudden squall swamped the boat" without attracting the attention of anyone on board the Grampus or the yacht. But one of the watermen, who was able to cling to the overturned boat, was seen by the men in a Custom-house boat, who immediately aroused the indignation of Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence and his brother-officers by steering, apparently without any reason, right across the bows of the Fairy. Prince Albert, who was on deck, was the first to discover the cause of the inexplicable conduct of the men in the Custom-house boat. "He called out that he saw a man in the water;" the Queen hurried out of her pavilion, and distinguished a man on what turned out to be the keel of a boat. "Oh dear! there are more!" cried Prince Albert in horror, "which quite overcame me," the Queen wrote afterwards. "The royal yacht was stopped and one of its boats lowered, which picked up three of the women—one of them alive and clinging to a plank, the others dead." The storm was violent, and the responsibility of keeping the yacht exposed to its fury lay with Lord Adolphus. Since nothing further could be attempted for the victims of their own rashness, he did not think it right that the yacht should stay for the return of the boat, as he held the delay unsafe, although both the Queen and the Prince, with finer instincts, were anxious this should be done. "We could not stop," wrote her Majesty again, full of pity. "It was a dreadful moment, too horrid to describe. It is a consolation to think we were of some use, and also that, even if the yacht had remained, they could not have done more. Still, we all keep feeling we might, though I think we could not…. It is a terrible thing, and haunts me continually."
The Magyar War under Kossuth was raging in Hungary. In the far-away Punjab the Sikh War, in which Lieutenant Edwardes had borne so gallant a part in the beginning of the year, was still prolonged, with Mooltan always the bone of contention.
In October all aristocratic England was excited by the sale of the Art treasures of Stowe, which lasted for forty days. Mrs. Gaskell made a fine contribution to literature in her novel of "Mary Barton," in which genius threw its strong light on Manchester life.
The Queen had a private theatre fitted up this year in the Rubens Room, Windsor Castle. The first of the dramatis personae in the best London theatres went down and acted before the Court, giving revivals of Shakespeare—which it was hoped would improve the taste for the higher drama—varied by lighter pieces.
On the 24th of November the Queen heard of the death of her former Minister and counsellor William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne. "Truly and sincerely," her Majesty wrote in her Journal, "do I deplore the loss of one who was a most disinterested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was, indeed, for the first two years and a half of my reign, almost the only friend I had, except Stockmar and Lehzen, and I used to see him constantly, daily. I thought much and talked much of him all day."