The Emperor was invested with the Order of the Garter in the Throne- room. The forms were the same as those followed in the investiture of Louis Philippe, and no doubt the one scene recalled the other vividly enough. Bishop Wilberforce was present and gives some particulars: "A very full chapter. The Duke of Buckingham (whose conduct had not been very knightly) came unsummoned, and was not asked to remain to dinner. The Emperor looked exulting and exceedingly pleased." After the chapter, the Emperor sent for the Bishop, that he might be presented. His lordship's opinion was that Louis Napoleon was "rather mean- looking, small, and a tendency to embonpoint; a remarkable way, as it were, of swimming up a room, with an uncertain gait; a small grey eye, looking cunning, but with an aspect of softness about it too. The Empress, a peculiar face from the arched eye-brows, blonde complexion; an air of sadness about her, but a person whose countenance at once interests you. The banquet was magnificent. At night," ends Bishop Wilberforce, "the Queen spoke to me. 'All went off very well, I think; I was afraid of making some mistake; you would not let me have in writing what I was to say to him. Then we put the riband on wrong, but I think it all went off well on the whole.'"
The Emperor and Empress were invited to a banquet at Guildhall. They went from Buckingham Palace, to which the Queen and Prince Albert had accompanied them. The Queen wrote in her journal that their departure from Windsor made her sad. The passing through the familiar rooms and descending the staircase to the mournful strains of "Partant pour la Syrie" (composed by the Emperor's mother, Queen Hortense, and heard by her Majesty fourteen different times that April day), the sense that the visit about which there had been so much excitement was nearly over, the natural doubt how and when the group would meet again, touched her as with a sense of foreboding.
The Emperor and Empress drove from Buckingham Palace to Guildhall in six of the Queen's State carriages, the first drawn by the famous cream-coloured horses. The whole route was packed with people, who gave the visitors a thorough ovation. The City hall was decorated with the flags of England, France, and Turkey; and the lion and the eagle conjointly supported devices which bore the names "Alma, Balaclava, and Inkermann." At the déjeuner sherry was served which had reached the venerable age of one hundred and nine years, was valued at £600 the butt, and had belonged to the great Napoleon. The same evening, the Queen and the Prince, with their guests, went in State to the Italian Opera, where Fidelio was performed. "We literally drove through a sea of human beings, cheering and pressing near the carriage." The illuminated streets bore many devices—of N.E. and V.A., which the Emperor remarked made the word "Neva"—a coincidence on which he appears to have dwelt with his share of the superstition of the Buonapartes. The Opera-house and the royal box were richly decorated for the occasion. On entering, her Majesty led the Emperor, and Prince Albert the Empress, to the front of the box, amidst great applause. The audience was immense, a dense mass of ladies and gentlemen in full dress being allowed to occupy a place behind the singers on the stage.
The next day, a beautiful April day, the Queen discovered was the forty-seventh birthday of the Emperor; and when she went to meet him in the corridor, she wished him joy and gave him a pencil-case. He smiled and kissed her hand, and accepted with empressment two violets— the Buonapartes' flower—brought to him by Prince Arthur. All along the thronged road to Sydenham, cries of "Vive l'Empereur!" and "Vive l'Impératrice!" alternated with cheers for the Queen. The public were not admitted while the royal party were in the palace, but they gathered twenty thousand strong on the terrace; and when her Majesty, with her guests, came out on the balcony to enjoy the beautiful view, such shouts of loyalty and welcome filled the spring air as struck even ears well accustomed to public greetings. After luncheon the Queen and her visitors returned to the Palace, having to pass through an avenue of people lining the nave, to reach the balcony from which the strangers were to see the fine spectacle of the fountains playing. The Queen owned afterwards she was anxious; yet, she added, "I felt as I leant on the emperor's arm, that I was possibly a protection for him. All thoughts of nervousness for myself were lost. I thought only of him; and so it is, Albert says, when one forgets oneself, one loses this great and foolish nervousness." A sentence worthy of him and of her.
Alas for fickle fortune and the changes which time brings! The present writer was accidentally present on the occasion of the Emperor and Empress's last visit to the Crystal Palace. They came from Chislehurst without any announcement, when they were not expected, on an ordinary shilling day in autumn, the company happening to be few. A slight stir and one or two policemen coming to the front, suggested that some theft had been committed, and that the offender was about to be taken into custody and removed from the building. Then an official walked bareheaded down the cleared nave, and behind him came a little yellow- skinned shrunken man in plain clothes, on whose arm a lady in a simple black silk walking-dress and country hat leant lightly, as if she were giving instead of receiving support. He made a slight attempt to acknowledge the faint greetings of the spectators, some of them ignorant of the identity of the visitors, all of them taken by surprise. She smiled and bowed from side to side, a little mechanically, as if anxious to overlook no courtesy and to act for both. It was not long after the battle of Sedan and the imprisonment at Wilhelmshohe, and the hand of death was already upon him. The couple hurried on, as if desirous of not being detained, and could not have tarried many minutes in the building when a few straggling cheers announced their departure.
In the afternoon of the 20th of April a second council relating to the war in the Crimea was held, at which the Queen was present. With her large interest in public affairs, her growing experience, and her healthy appetite for the work of her life, she enjoyed it exceedingly. "It was one of the most interesting scenes I was ever present at," she wrote in her journal. "I would not have missed it for the world."
On Saturday, the 21st of April, the visitors left, after the Emperor had written a graceful French sentence in the Queen's album, and an admonitory verse in German, which had originally been written for himself, in the Prince of Wales's autograph book. The Queen accompanied her visitors to the door, and parted from them with kindly regret. As they drove off she "ran up" to see the last of the travellers from the saloon they had just quitted. "The Emperor and Empress saw us at the window," she wrote, "turned round, got up, and bowed…. We watched them, with the glittering escort, till they could be seen no more…." The Prince escorted the Emperor and Empress to Dover. The Queen wrote in a short memorandum her view of the Emperor's character, and what she expected from the visit in a political light. Through the good sense of the paper one can see how the confiding friendly nature had survived the rough check given to it by Louis Philippe's manoeuvres and dissimulation.
On the 1st of May the Academy opened with Millais's "Rescue of children from a burning house," and with a remarkable picture by a young painter who has long since vindicated the reception it met with. It was Mr. F. Leighton's "Procession conveying Cimabue's Madonna through the streets of Florence."
On the 18th of May her Majesty distributed medals to some of the heroes of the war still raging. The scene was both picturesque and pathetic, since many of the recipients of the honour were barely recovered from their wounds. The presentation took place in the centre of the parade of the Horse Guards, where a dais was erected for the ceremony, while galleries had been fitted up in the neighbouring public offices for the accommodation of members of the royal family and nobility. Barriers shut off the actors in the scene, and a great gathering of officers, from the crowd which filled every inch of open space and flowed over into St. James's Park.
The Queen, the Prince, with many of the royal family, the Court, the Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary for War, and "a host of generals and admirals," arrived about eleven o'clock. The soldiers who kept the ground formed four deep, making three sides of a square, and the men to be decorated passed up the open space, until "the Queen stood face to face with a mass of men who had suffered and bled in her cause."