Shall we be accused of small moralities and petty lessons in thrift if we say that this passage in Sir Robert Peel's speech recalls the stories of the child-Princess's training, in a wholesome horror of debt, and the exercise of such little acts of self-denial as can alone come in a child's way; that it brings to mind the Tunbridge anecdote of the tiny purchaser on her donkey, bidden to look at her empty purse when a little box in the bazaar caught her eye, and prohibited from going further in obtaining the treasure, till the next quarter's allowance was due? Well might the nation that had read the report of Sir Robert Peel's speech listen complacently when it heard in the following month, of the Queen's acquisition of a private property which should be all her own and her husband's, to do with, as they chose. Another country bestowed, upon quite different grounds, on one of its sovereigns the honourable title of King Honest Man. Here was Queen Honest Woman, who would not buy what she could not afford, or ask her people to pay for fancies in which she indulged, regardless of her means. A different example had been presented by poor Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, who, after a course of what their most faithful servants admitted to be grievous misrule and misappropriation of public dignities and funds—to satisfy the ambition and greed of favourites or their friends—in the face of national bankruptcy, private ruin, and widespread disaffection, in the very death-throes of the Revolution, chose that time of all others to buy—under whatever specious pretext of exchange and indemnification—for him who had already so many hunting-seats, the fresh one of Rambouillet; for her, who had Little Trianon in its perfection, the new suburban country house of St. Cloud.
Osborne abounded in the advantages which the royal couple sought. It was in the Isle of Wight, which her Majesty had loved in her girlhood, with the girdle of sea that gave such assurance of the much-courted, much-needed seclusion, as could hardly be procured elsewhere— certainly not within a reasonable distance of London. It was a lovely place by nature, with no end of capabilities for the practice of the Prince's pleasant faculty of landscape-gardening, with which he had already done wonders in the circumscribed grounds of Buckingham Palace and the larger field of Windsor. There were not only woods and valleys and charming points of view—among them a fine look at Spithead; the woods went down to the sea, and the beach belonged to the estate. Such a quiet country home for a country and home-loving Queen and Prince, and for the little children, to whom tranquillity, freedom, the woods, the fields, and the sea-sands were of such vital and lasting consequence, was inestimable.
In addition to other outlets for an active, beneficent nature, Osborne, with its works of building, planting, and improving going on for years to come, had also its farms, like the Home Farm at Windsor. And the Prince was fond of farming no less than of landscape-gardening —proud of his practical success in making it pay, deeply interested in all questions of agriculture and their treatment, so as to secure permanent employment and ample provision for the labourers. Prince Albert's love of animals, too, found scope in these farming operations. When the Queen and the Prince visited the Home Farm the tame pigeons would settle on his hat and her shoulders. The accompanying engraving represents the pasture and part of the Home Farm at Osborne. "The cow in the group was presented to her Majesty by the Corporation of Guernsey, when the Queen visited the Channel Islands; the animal is a beautiful specimen of the Alderney breed, and is a great favourite … on the forehead of the cow is a V distinctly marked; a peculiarity, it may be presumed, which led to the presentation; the other animals are her calves."
In the course of this session of Parliament, the Queen sought more than once to mark her acknowledgment of the services of Sir Robert Peel, round whose political career troubles were gathering. She acted as sponsor to his grandchild—the heir of the Jersey family—and she offered Sir Robert, through Lord Aberdeen, the Order of the Garter, an offer which the Prime Minister respectfully declined in words that deserve to be remembered. He sprang from the people, he said, and was essentially of the people, and such an honour, in his case, would be misapplied. His heart was not set upon titles of honour or social distinction. His reward lay in her Majesty's confidence, of which, by many indications, she had given him the fullest assurance; and when he left her service the only distinction he courted was that she should say to him, "You have been a faithful servant, and have done your duty to your country and to myself."
CHAPTER II.
THE QUEEN'S POWDER BALL.
On the evening of the 6th of June, 1845, her Majesty, who was at Buckingham Palace for the season, gave another great costume ball, still remembered as her Powder Ball—a name bestowed on it because of the universally-worn powder on hair and periwigs. It was not such a novelty as the Plantagenet Ball had been, neither was it so splendidly fantastic nor apparently so costly a performance; not that the materials used in the dresses were less valuable, but several of them —notably the old lace which was so marked a feature in the spectacle that it might as well have been called "The Lace Ball"—existed in many of the great houses in store, like the family diamonds, and had only to be brought out with the other heirlooms, and properly disposed of, to constitute the wearer en grande tenue. No doubt trade was still to be encouraged, and Spitalfields, in its chronic adversity, to be brought a little nearer to prosperity by the manufacture of sumptuous stuffs, in imitation of gorgeous old brocades, for a portion of the twelve hundred guests. But these motives were neither so urgent nor so ostensible, and perhaps the ball originated as much in a wish to keep up a good custom once begun, and to show some cherished guests a choice example of princely hospitality, as in an elaborate calculation of forced gain to an exotic trade.
The period chosen for the representation was much nearer the present. It was only a hundred years back, from 1740 to 1750. It may be that this comparative nearness fettered rather than emancipated the players in the game, and that, though civil wars and clan feuds had long died out, and the memory of the Scotch rebellion was no more than a picturesque tragic romance, a trifle of awkwardness survived in the encounter, face to face once more, in the very guise of the past, of the descendants of the men and women who had won at Prestonpans and lost at Culloden. It was said that a grave and stately formality distinguished this ball—a tone attributed to dignified, troublesome fashions—stranger then, but which since these days have become more familiar to us.
No two more attractive figures presented themselves that night than the sisters-in-law, the Duchess of Kent and the Duchess of Gloucester, the one in her sixtieth the other in her seventieth year. The third royal duchess in the worthy trio, who represented long and well the royal matronhood of England, the Duchess of Cambridge, was, along with her Duke, prevented from being present at the Queen's ball in consequence of a recent death in her family. The Duchess of Kent wore a striped and "flowered" brocade, with quantities of black lace relieving the white satin of her train. The Duchess of Gloucester, sweet pretty Princess Mary of more than fifty years before, came in the character of a much less happy woman, Marie Leczinska, the queen of Louis XV. She must have looked charming in her rich black brocade, and some of the hoards of superb lace—which she is said to have inherited from her mother, Queen Charlotte—edged with strings of diamonds and agraffes of diamonds, while over her powdered hair was tied a fichu capuchin of Chantilly.
Among the multitude of guests assembled at Buckingham Palace, the privileged few who danced in the Queen's minuets, as well as the members of the royal family, arrived by the Garden Gate and were received in the Yellow Drawing-room. Included in this select company was a German princess who had lately married an English subject— Princess Marie of Baden, wife of the Marquis of Douglas, not the first princess who had wedded into the noble Scotch house of Hamilton, though it was many a long century since Earl Walter received—