CHAPTER I.
ROYAL PROGRESSES TO BURGHLEY, STOWE, AND STRATHFIELDSAYE.
On the 29th of November the Queen went on one of her visits to her nobility. We are told, and we can easily believe, these visits were very popular and eagerly contested for. In her Majesty's choice of localities it would seem as if she loved sometimes to retrace her early footsteps by going again with her husband to the places where she had been, as the young Princess, with the Duchess of Kent. The Queen went at this time to Burghley, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter. The tenantry of the different noblemen whose lands she passed through lined the roads, the mayors of the various towns presented addresses, the school children sang the National Anthem.
At Burghley, too, Queen Elizabeth had been before Queen Victoria. She also had visited a Cecil. The Maiden Queen had travelled under difficulties. The country roads of her day had been so nearly impassable that her only means of transit had been to use a pillion behind her Lord Steward. Her seat in the chapel was pointed out to the Queen and Prince Albert when they went there for morning prayers. Whether or not both queens whiled away a rainy day by going over the whole manor-house, down to the kitchen, we cannot say; but it is not likely that her Majesty's predecessor underwent the ordeal to her gravity of passing through a gentleman's bedroom and finding his best wig and whiskers displayed upon a block on a chest of drawers. And we are not aware that Queen Elizabeth witnessed such an interesting family rite as that which her Majesty graced by her presence. The youngest daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter was christened in the chapel, at six o'clock in the evening, before the Queen, and was named for her "Lady Victoria Cecil," while Prince Albert stood as godfather to the child. After the baptism the Queen kissed her little namesake, and Prince Albert presented her with a gold cup bearing the inscription, "To Lady Victoria Cecil, from her godfather Albert." At dinner the newly-named child was duly toasted by the Queen's command.
The next day the royal party visited "Stamford town," from which the Mayor afterwards sent Prince Albert the gift of a pair of Wellington boots, as a sample of the trade of the place. The drive extended to the ruins of another manor-house which, Lady Bloomfield heard, was built by the Cecils for a temporary resort when their house of Burghley was swept. The Queen and the Prince planted an oak and a lime, not far from Queen Elizabeth's lime. The festivities ended with a great dinner and ball, at which the Queen did not dance. Most of the company passed before her chair of State on the dais, as they do at a drawing-room.
On the 29th of December an aged English kinswoman of the Queen's died at the Ranger's House, Blackheath, where she held the somewhat anomalous office of Ranger of Greenwich Park. This was Princess Sophia Matilda, daughter of the Duke of Gloucester, George III.'s brother, and sister of the late Duke of Gloucester, the husband of his cousin, Princess Mary.
Her mother's history was a romance. She was the beautiful niece of Horace Walpole, the illegitimate daughter of his brother, the Earl of Oxford. She married first the Earl of Waldegrave, and became the mother of the three lovely sisters whom Sir Joshua Reynolds's brush immortalised. The widowed countess caught the fancy of the royal Duke, just as it was said, in contemporary letters, that another fair young widow turned the head of another brother of the King's. George III. refused at first to acknowledge the Duke of Gloucester's marriage, but finally withdrew his opposition. If, as was reported, the Duke of York married Lady Mary Coke, the marriage was never ratified. The risk of such marriages caused the passing of the Royal Marriage Act, which rendered the marriage of any member of the royal family without the consent of the reigning sovereign illegal. The children of the Duke of Gloucester and his Duchess were two—Prince William and Princess Sophia Matilda. They held the somewhat doubtful position, perhaps more marked in those days, of a family royal on one side of the house only. The brother, if not a very brilliant, an inoffensive and not an illiberal prince, though wicked wags called him "Silly Billy," improved the situation by his marriage with the amiable and popular Princess Mary, to whom a private gentleman, enamoured by hearsay with her virtues, left a considerable fortune. We get a passing glimpse of the sister, Princess Sophia Matilda, in Fanny Burney's diary. She was then a pretty, sprightly girl, having apparently inherited some of her beautiful mother's and half-sisters' attractions. She was admitted to terms of considerable familiarity and intimacy with her royal cousins; and yet she was not of the circle of Queen Charlotte, neither could she descend gracefully to a lower rank. No husband, royal or noble, was found for her. One cannot think of her without attaching a sense of loneliness to her princely estate. She survived her brother, the Duke of Gloucester, ten years, and died at the age of seventy-two at the Ranger's House, Blackheath, from which she had dispensed many kindly charities. At her funeral the royal standard was hoisted half- mast high on Greenwich Hospital, the Observatory, the churches of St. Mary and St. Alphege, and on Blackheath. She was laid, with nearly all her royal race for the last two generations, in the burial-place of kings, St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Prince Albert occupied his stall as a Knight of the Garter, with a mourning scarf across his field- marshal's uniform.
In the middle of January, 1845, the Queen and Prince Albert went on a visit to the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe, which was still unstripped of its splendid possessions and interesting antiquarian relics. The huge gathering of neighbours and tenants included waggons full of labourers, admitted into the park to see the Queen's arrival and the illumination of the great house at night.
The amusements of the next two days, the ordinary length of a royal visit, began with battues for the Prince, when the accumulation of game was so enormous that, in place of the fact being remarkable that "he hit almost everything he fired at," it would have been singular if a good shot could have avoided doing so. Fifty beaters, so near each other that their sticks almost touched, entered a thick cover and drove the game past the place where the sportsmen were stationed, into the open space of the park. Out the hares rushed from every quarter, "so many of them, that it was often impossible to stop more than one out of half-a-dozen. The ground immediately in front of the shooters became strewn with dead and dying…. It was curious to behold the evident reluctance with which the hares left their retreat, and then their perplexity at finding themselves so beset without. Many actually made for the canal, and swam like dogs across a piece of water nearly a hundred yards wide, shaking themselves upon landing, and making off without any apparent distress. The pheasants were still more averse 'to come and be killed.' For some time not one appeared above the trees. The cocks were heard crowing like domestic fowls, as the numerous tribe retreated before the sticks of the advancing army of beaters. Upon arriving, however, at the edge of the wood, quite a cloud ascended, and the slaughter was proportionately great."
"Slaughter," not sport, is the appropriate word. One cannot help thinking that so it must have struck the Prince; nor are we surprised that, on the next opportunity he had of exercising a sportsman's legitimate vocation, with the good qualities of patience, endurance, and skill, which it is calculated to call forth, emphatic mention is made of his keen enjoyment.