By the beginning of September terrible tidings arrived from India. The massacre of the English women and children at Cawnpore, after the surrender of the fort, and the perilous position of the garrison at Lucknow, darkened the usually joyous stay at Balmoral, to which the Princess Royal was paying her last visit. Another source of distress to the Queen and the Prince, when the mutiny began to be put down, was the indiscriminate vengeance which a section of the rulers in India seemed inclined to take on the natives for the brutalities of the rebels. At length Lucknow was relieved, and England breathed freely again, though the country had to mourn the death of Havelock. Sir Colin Campbell completed the defeat of the enemy, and the first steps were taken to put an end to the complications of government in India, by bringing the great colony directly under the rule of the Queen, and causing the intermediate authority of the East India Company to cease.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ROYAL.
In the end of 1857 there were many preparations for the marriage of the Princess Royal in the month of January in the coming year. In the interval a calamity occurred at Claremont which revived the recollection of the great disaster in the early years of the century, and was deeply felt by the Queen and the Prince Consort. The pretty and gentle Victoire, Duchesse de Nemours, the Queen and the Prince Consort's cousin, and his early playfellow, had given birth to a princess, and appeared to be recovering, in spite of her presentiment to the contrary. The Queen had gone to see and congratulate her. The old Queen Amélie and the Duc de Nemours had been at Windsor full of thankfulness for the happy event. The Duchess was sitting up in bed, looking cheerfully at the new dress in which she was to rejoin the family circle next day, when in a second she fell back dead.
Another shock was the news of the Orsini bomb, which exploded close to the Emperor and Empress of the French as they were about to enter the opera-house.
The marriage of the Princess Royal was fixed for the 25th of January, 1858. On the 15th the Court left Windsor for Buckingham Palace, when the Queen's diary records the sorrow with which the young bride relinquished many of the scenes and habits of her youth. One sentence recalls vividly the kindly family ties which united the royal children. Her Majesty writes, "She slept for the last time in the same room with Alice." In the course of the next few days all the guests had assembled, including, King Leopold and his sons, the Prince and Princess of Prussia, the Duke of Saxe Coburg, with minor princes and princesses, to the number of nearly thirty, so that even Buckingham Palace was hardly large enough to hold the guests and their suites. At the nightly dinner party from eighty to ninety covers were laid. But one old friend was absent, to the regret of all, and not least so of the bride. Baron Stockmar was too ill to accept the invitation to be present at the ceremony. One of his sons was to accompany the Princess to Berlin as her treasurer.
"Such bustle and excitement," wrote the Queen, and then she describes an evening party with a "very gay and pretty dance" on the 18th, when Ernest, Duke of Coburg, said, "It seemed like a dream to him to see Vicky dance as a bride, just as I did eighteen years ago, and I am still (so he said) looking very young. In 1840 poor dear papa (late Duke of Coburg) danced with me, as Ernest danced with Vicky." In truth, neither the father nor the mother of the bride of seventeen had reached the age of forty.
The first of the public festivities were three of the four State visits to Her Majesty's Theatre, "when the whole of the boxes on one side of the grand tier had been thrown into one" for the royal company gracing the brilliant audience—which, as on a former occasion, filled the back of the stage as well as the rest of the house. The plays and operas were, Macbeth, in which Helen Faucit acted, [Footnote: Another great actress had just passed away in her prime. Mademoiselle Rachel had died in the beginning of this month, near Cannes.] Twice Killed, The Rose of Castille, Somnambula. At the first performance, the Queen sat between the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Prussia. After the play, "God save the Queen" was sung with much enthusiasm.
As when her own marriage had occurred, all the nation sympathised with Her Majesty. It was as if from every house a cherished young daughter was being sent with honour and blessing. The Princess Royal, always much liked, appealed especially to the popular imagination at this time because of her extreme youth, her position as a bride, and the circumstance that she was the first of the Queen's children thus to quit the home-roof. But, indeed, we cannot read the published passages in the Queen's journal that refer to the marriage without a lively realisation of the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, without a sense that good true hearts beat alike everywhere, and that strong family affection—an elixir of life—is the same in the palace as in the cottage.
In fine frosty weather, on Saturday, the 23rd, the Prince Consort, after a walk in Buckingham Palace Gardens with the Queen and the child so soon to be parted from them, started to bring the bridegroom, who had landed in England that morning. He arrived in the middle of the day, and was received in the presence of the Court. The Queen found him looking pale and nervous, but no doubt alive to her warm greeting, at the bottom of the grand staircase. At the top a still sweeter reward awaited him, for the Princess Royal, with her fifteen years' old sister, Princess Alice, to keep her company, stood there.