The Prince wrote of the miserable occurrence to Baron Stockmar that its perpetrator was a dandy "whom you must often have seen in the Park, where he has made himself conspicuous. He maintains the closest silence as to his motives, but is manifestly deranged. All this does not help to make one cheerful."
The man was the son of a gentleman named Pate, of wealth and position, who had acted as sheriff of Cambridgeshire. The son had had a commission in the army, from which he had been requested to retire, on account of an amount of eccentricity that had led at least to one serious breach of discipline. He could give no reason for his conduct beyond making the statement that he had acted on a sudden uncontrollable impulse. He was tried in the following July. The jury refused to accept the plea of insanity, and he was sentenced, like his predecessor, to seven years' transportation.
At the date of the attack the minds of the Queen and the Prince, and indeed of a large portion of the civilised world, were much occupied with a serious foreign embroilment into which the Government had been drawn by what many people considered the restless and interfering policy of Lord Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had gone so far as to send a fleet into Greek waters for the protection of two British subjects claiming assistance, and in the act he had offended France and Russia.
Much political excitement was aroused, and there were keen and protracted debates in both Houses of Parliament. In the House of Lords something like a vote of censure of the foreign policy of the Government was moved and carried. In the House of Commons the debate lasted five nights, and the fine speech in which Lord Palmerston, a man in his sixty-sixth year, defended his policy, was continued "from the dusk of one day to the dawn of the next."
Apart from these troubles abroad, the country, on the whole, was in a prosperous and satisfactory condition. Trade was flourishing. Neither had literature fallen behind. Perhaps it had rarely shown a more brilliant galaxy of contemporary names, including those of John Stuart Mill in logic, Herbert Spencer in philosophy, Charles Darwin in natural science, Ruskin in art criticism, Helps as an essayist. And in this year Tennyson brought out his "In Memoriam," and Kingsley his "Alton Lock". It seemed but natural that the earlier lights should be dying out before the later; that Lord Jeffrey, the old king of critics, should pass beyond the sound of reviews; and Wordsworth, after this spring, be seen no more among the Cumberland hills and dales; and Jane Porter, whose innocent high-flown romances had been the delight of the young reading world more than fifty years before, should end her days, a cheerful old lady, in the prosaic town of Bristol.
In the Academy's annual exhibition the same old names of Landseer (with his popular picture of the Duke of Wellington showing his daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, the field of Waterloo), Maclise, Mulready, Stanfield, &c. &c., came still to the front. But a new movement, having a foreign origin, though in this case an English development, known as the pre-Raphaelite theory, with Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti as its leaders, was already at work. This year there was a picture by Millais—still a lad of twenty-one—in support of the protest against conventionality in the beautiful, which did not fail to attract attention, though it excited as much condemnation as praise. The picture was "Christ in the House of His Parents," better known as "The Carpenter's Shop."
CHAPTER XV.
THE DEATHS OF SIR ROBERT PEEL, THE DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE, AND LOUIS PHILIPPE.
The Court had been at Osborne for the Whitsun holidays, and the Prince had written to Germany, "In our island home we are wholly given up to the enjoyment of the warm summer weather. The children catch butterflies, Victoria sits under the trees, and I drink the Kissingen water, Ragotzky. To-day mamma-aunt (the Duchess of Kent) and Charles (Prince of Leiningen) are come to stay a fortnight with us; then we go to town to compress the (so-called) pleasures of the season into four weeks. God be merciful to us miserable sinners."
There was more to be encountered in town this year, than the hackneyed round of gaieties—from which even royalty, with all the will in the world, could not altogether free itself. The first shock was the violent opposition, got up alike by the press and in Parliament, to Hyde Park as the site of the building required for the Exhibition. Following hard upon it came the melancholy news of the accident to Sir Robert Peel, which occurred at the very door, so simply and yet so fatally. Sir Robert, who, was riding out on Saturday, the 29th of June, had just called at Buckingham Palace and written his name in her Majesty's visiting-book. He was going up Constitution Hill, and had reached the wicket-gate leading into the Green Park, when he met Miss Ellis, Lady Dover's daughter, with whom he was acquainted, also riding. Sir Robert exchanged greetings with the young lady, and his horse became restive, "swerved towards the rails of the Green Park," and threw its rider, who had a bad seat in the saddle, sideways on his left shoulder. It was supposed that Sir Robert held by the reins, so as to drag the animal down with its knees on his shoulder.