Sir E. Landseer, R.A.] [In the Royal Collection (by permission of
Messrs. Graves).
THE QUEEN, PRINCE CONSORT, AND PRINCESS ROYAL, AT WINDSOR CASTLE, 1843.
During the five years of his last Administration he had restored equilibrium to the national finances. He turned the deficit of two millions to which he succeeded to a surplus of five millions in 1845. He carried the grant to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth against the votes of half his own party, though it cost him the loss of his colleague, Mr. W. E. Gladstone. |Review of Peel’s Administration.| Mr. Gladstone himself lived to abolish the grant, for it was he who ruled the whirlwind that swept away the Irish State Church in 1866, and the Maynooth grants disappeared with it. Peel’s Administration must also be credited with a marked advance in legislation for the working classes. Lord Ashley (better known in later years as Earl of Shaftesbury) had obtained the appointment of a Commission to inquire into the employment of women in collieries: the horrible evils thereby brought to light, the infamous degradation of women and girls, harnessed like beasts of draught with a girdle round their waist—unclothed, unwashed, and sometimes hopelessly crippled—deeply moved the public mind, and the Act of 1842, prohibiting the employment of females in mines, passed almost without opposition. More prolonged was the resistance to the Factory Act of 1844, regulating the hours of labour of youthful persons. This beneficent legislation should not be overlooked in the glare of conflict over the Corn Laws.
F. Winterhalter.] [In the Royal Collection.
HER MAJESTY RECEIVING KING LOUIS PHILIPPE AT WINDSOR CASTLE, October 8, 1844.
Louis Philippe was the first French Monarch who ever set foot in the British Islands on a visit of peace. The Prince Consort met him at Portsmouth and accompanied him to Windsor, where the Queen awaited him. At the banquet “he talked to me,” writes the Queen, “of the time when he was in a school in the Grisons, a teacher merely, receiving twenty pence a day, having to brush his own boots, and under the name of Chabot.” On the following day he was installed Knight of the Garter. He left England on the 13th.