Queen Victoria to Lady Russell[87]
WINDSOR CASTLE, June 29, 1874
DEAR LADY RUSSELL,--I cannot remain silent without writing to express to you my deep and sincere sympathy with you both, and especially with your poor son on this most sad event, which has deprived him of his wife, and his little children (whom I saw so lately) of an affectionate mother, in the very prime of life! I saw the sad announcement in the papers this morning and could hardly believe it, never having heard even of her illness. This sad event will, I know, be a terrible blow to you, and to Lord Russell, and I know that you have had much sorrow and anxiety lately. Dear Lady Russell, I have known you both too long not to feel the truest and deepest interest in all that concerns you and yours--in weal and woe--and I would not delay a moment in writing to express this to you. You will, I know, look for support and for comfort where alone it can be found, and I pray that God may support and comfort you and your poor bereaved son.
Ever yours affectionately,
V. R.
I should be very grateful if you would let me have any details of poor Lady Amberley's illness and death.
Queen Victoria to Lady Russell
WINDSOR CASTLE, July 3, 1874
DEAREST LADY RUSSELL,--Your two sad and touching letters have affected me deeply, and I thank you much for writing to me. It is too dreadful that the dear little girl whose bright eyes and look of health I so well remember at Pembroke Lodge should also be taken. May God support your poor unhappy son, for whom your heart must bleed, and whose agony of grief and bereavement seems almost too much to bear. But if he will but trust our Father in Heaven, and feel all is sent in love, though he may have to go through months and years of the bitterest sufferings, and of anguish indescribable, he will find peace and resignation and comfort come at last--when it seems farthest. I know this myself. For you, dear Lady Russell and dear Lord Russell, I do feel so deeply. Your trials have been so great lately.... I shall be really grateful if you would write to me again to say how Lord Russell bears this new blow, and how your poor son Amberley is. Agatha, who is so devoted a daughter, will, I am sure, do all she can now to help and comfort you, but she will be deeply distressed herself. And poor dear Lady Clarendon is dying I fear, and poor Emily Russell only just confined, and unable to go and see her. It is dreadful.
With fervent prayers that your health may not suffer, and that you may be mercifully supported.
Ever yours affectionately,
V.R.
Lord Russell to Lady Minto
PEMBROKE LODGE, July 3, 1874
MY DEAR NINA,--We are struck down by the death of my dear pet, Rachel, who was taken from us to stay with her parents at Ravenscroft. It was but too natural that Kate should wish to have her child with her, but the event is heart-breaking--such a darling, so bright, so pretty.
"Elle a duré ce que durent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."
I am always touched by those French verses, and now I apply them tearfully.
Ever yours affectionately,
RUSSELL
In the summer of 1874 Lord Russell took Aldworth, Tennyson's beautiful home near Haslemere, where they remained for some months.
Lady Russell to Lord Amberley
ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, November 10, 1874
We have been going on in a happy humdrum way since I last wrote--humdrum as regards events, and all the happier that it should be so--but with no lack of delightful occupation and delightful conversation, and that intimate interchange of thought which makes home life so much fuller than society life. However, it would not do to go on long cut off from the world and its ways and from the blessing of the society of real friends, which unluckily can't be had without intermixture of wearisome acquaintances.
Rollo's reader is reading Molesworth's "History of England for the last Forty Years," and Agatha takes advantage and listens, and I read it by myself, and as your father knows it all without reading it and likes to be talked to about it, we have been living a good deal in the great events of that period, and we find it a relief to turn from the mazy though deeply interesting flood of metaphysics which this age pours upon the world, to facts and events which also have their philosophy, and a deep one too.
PEMBROKE LODGE, December 28, 1874
Finished "Life of Prince Albert." It is seldom that a revelation of the inner life of Princes would raise the mind to a higher region than before--although we all know that they have an inner and a real life through the tinsels and the trappings in which we see them. But this book can hardly fail to raise any mind, warm any heart, brace any soul. Would that we all, in all conditions of life, kept truth and duty ever before us, as he did even amid the pettinesses of a Court--the solemn trifles of etiquette which would have stifled the nobleness of a less noble nature. Would that all Princes had a Stockmar,[88] but there are not many Stockmars in the world; if there were, there would soon not be many Princes of the kind which now abounds, beings cut off from equality, friendship, freedom, by what in our supreme folly we call the "necessary" pomp and fetters of a Court. Noble as Prince Albert was, those things did him harm, and as Lady Lyttelton says, nobody but the organ knew what was in him.... The Queen appears in a charming light--truthfulness, humility, unbounded love for him.
Lady Russell to Lord Amberley
PEMBROKE LODGE, December 29, 1874
M. d'Etchegoyen[89] has given me Mill's three essays. I have read "Nature," a great deal of which I like much, but were it to be read by the inhabitant of some other planet, he would have a very false notion of this one; for Mill dwells almost entirely on the ugly and malevolent side of Nature, leaving out of sight the beautiful and benevolent side--whereas both abound, and suggest the notion of two powers at strife for the government of the world. If you bring the "Conscious Machine Controversy," I may read it, although I feel very uncharitable to the hard, presumptuous unwisdom of some modern metaphysics.
Lady Russell to Lord Amberley
PEMBROKE LODGE, March 28, 1875
This is our Agatha's birthday, and the spirit moves me to write to you. Every marked day, whether marked by sorrow or by joy, turns my heart, if possible, more than usual to you, and makes me feel more keenly how all the joy and perfect happiness once yours has been turned to bitter sorrow and desolation. I find it is far, far more difficult to bear grief for one's children than for oneself, and sometimes my heart "has been like to break" as I have followed you in thought on your long and dreary journey, and remembered what your companionship was when last you went to the sunny South, to so many of the same places. You have indeed been sorely tried, my child, and you have not--would that I could give it to you--the one and only rock of refuge and consolation, of faith in the wisdom and mercy of a God of love. But I trust in Him for you, and I know that though clouds hide Him from your sight, He will care for you and not forsake you--and even here on earth I look forward to much peaceful happiness for you, in your children, in books, in nature, in duties zealously done, in the love and sympathy of many--"Mutter Treu ist ewig neu," and that you may find some rest to your aching heart in that Mutter Treue, which is always hovering round you, wherever you are, and to which every day seems to add fresh strength and renewed longing to give you comfort, is my daily, nightly hope and prayer. May this letter find you well and cheerful and able to enjoy the loveliness of sea and sky and mountain; if so, I know it will not sadden you to get this drop out of the ocean of my thoughts about you--thoughts which the freshness of the wounds makes it intensely difficult for me to utter.... Kiss my two precious little boys and keep us in their memory. Is Bertrand as full of fun and merriment as he used to be? Poor pets! they look to you for all the tenderness of father and mother combined in order to be as happy as children ought to be. Give it them largely, my child, as it is in your nature to do.... God bless you all.
In August, 1875, Lady Russell notes in her diary that her husband had written a letter to the Times giving his support to the Herzegovina insurgents. During the few years preceding 1876 he had become convinced that the days of Turkish misrule in the Christian provinces must be ended.[90] He frequently spoke with indignation of the systematic murders contrived by the Turkish Government and officials, and felt that the cause of the oppressed Christians deserved support, and that the time for upholding the rule of the Sultan as a cardinal principle in our policy had passed. He threw himself with the greatest heartiness into a movement for the aid of the insurgents. Though in his eighty-third year he was the first British statesman to break with the past and to bless the uprising of liberty in the near East. In the following letter, written from Caprera on September 17, 1875, the generous sympathy between him and Garibaldi found fresh expression.