LIFE OF HER MAJESTY
QUEEN VICTORIA.

BY

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.

BOSTON:

ROBERTS BROTHERS.

1895.

Copyright, 1895,
By Roberts Brothers.

All rights reserved.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

PREFACE.

It would have been impossible, within the limits of this little book, to narrate, even in barest outline, all the events of the Queen’s long life and reign. In attempting to deal with so large a subject in so short a space, I have therefore thought it best to dwell on what may be considered the formative influences on the Queen’s character in her early life, and in later years to refer only to political and personal events, in so far as they illustrate her character and her conception of her political functions. Even with this limitation, I am fully aware how far short I have come of being able to produce a worthy record of a noble life. I will only add that I begun this little book with a feeling towards Her Majesty of sincere veneration and gratitude, and that this feeling has been deepened by studying more closely than I had done before the ideal place of the Crown in the English Constitution, as a power above party, and the important part the Queen has taken now for nearly sixty years in making this ideal a reality. It is not too much to say that, by her sagacity and persistent devotion to duty, she has created modern constitutionalism, and more than any other single person has made England and the English monarchy what they now are.

A list of the books referred to will be found after the chronological table. Among them it is almost unnecessary to say that I am especially indebted to “The Early Years of the Prince Consort,” by General Grey, and to “The Life of the Prince Consort,” by Sir Theodore Martin. I also desire to express my respectful thanks to H. R. H. Princess Christian, for help very graciously and kindly given in the selection of a portrait for this little volume.

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.

April, 1895.

CONTENTS.

VICTORIA.

HER MAJESTY, QUEEN VICTORIA.

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEEN’S IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS.

Every now and then, on the birth of a male heir to any of the great historic kingdoms of Europe, the newspapers and the makers of public speeches break forth into rejoicing and thanksgiving that the country in question is secured from all the perils and evils supposed to be associated with the reign of a female Sovereign. It is of little importance, perhaps, that this attitude of mind conveys but a poor compliment to our Queen and other living Queens and Queen Regents; but it is not a little curious that the popular opinion to which these articles and speeches give expression, namely, that the chances are that any man will make a better Sovereign than any woman, is wholly contrary to experience; it is hardly going too far to say that in every country in which the succession to the Crown has been open to women, some of the greatest, most capable, and most patriotic Sovereigns have been queens. The names of Isabella of Spain, of Maria Theresa of Austria, will rise in this connection to every mind; and, little as she is to be admired as a woman, Catherine II. of Russia showed that she thoroughly understood the art of reigning. Her vices would have excited little remark had she been a king instead of a queen. It is an unconscious tribute to the higher standard of conduct queens have taught the world to expect from them, that while the historic muse stands aghast at the private life of the Russian Empress, she is only very mildly scandalized by a Charles V. or a Henry IV., thinking, with much justice, that their great qualities as rulers serve to cover their multitude of sins as private individuals. The brief which history could produce on behalf of Queens, as successful rulers, can be argued also from the negative side. The Salic law did not, to say the least, save the French monarchy from ruin. How far the overthrow of that monarchy was due to a combination of incompetence and depravity in various proportions in the descendants of the Capets from the Regent Orleans onwards towards the Revolution, is a question which must be decided by others. Carlyle’s view of the cause of the Revolution was that it was due to “every scoundrel that had lived, and, quack-like, pretended to be doing, and had only been eating and misdoing, in all provinces of life, as shoeblack or as sovereign lord, each in his degree, from the time of Charlemagne and earlier.” Women no doubt produced their share of quacks and charlatans in the humble ranks of this long procession of misdoers, but not as sovereigns, because, with the superior logic of the Gallic mind, the French people not only believed the accession of a woman to the throne to be a misfortune, but guarded themselves against the calamity by the Salic law. The fact affords a fresh proof that logic is a poor thing to be ruled by, because of the liability, which cannot be eliminated from human affairs, of making a mistake in the premises. The English plan, though less logical, is more practically successful. We speak and write as if a nation could not suffer a greater misfortune than to have a woman at the head of the State; but we do nothing to bar the female succession, with the result that out of our five Queens Regnant we have had three of eminent distinction as compared with any other Sovereign; and of these three, one ranks with the very greatest of the statesmen who deserve to be remembered as the Makers of England.

Something more can be claimed than that the Salic law did not prevent the overthrow of the French monarchy. It is probable that the female succession to the throne did save the English monarchy in 1837. Failing the Queen, the next heir would have been the Duke of Cumberland, and from all the records of the time, it does not suffice to say that he was unpopular, he was simply hated,—and with justice. He appears to have conceived it to be his function in Hanover “to cut the wings of the democracy;” if he had succeeded to the English throne and adopted the same policy here, he would have brought the whole fabric of the monarchy about his ears. He was equally without private and public virtues. The Duke of Wellington once asked George IV. why the Duke of Cumberland was so unpopular. The King replied, “Because there never was a father well with his son, or husband with his wife, or lover with his mistress, or friend with his friend, that he did not try to make mischief between them.”

The political power which has in various countries devolved on queens calls to mind one thing that ought to be remembered in discussions upon the hereditary principle in government. Within its own prescribed limitations it applies the democratic maxim, la carrière ouverte aux talents, much more completely than any nominally democratic form of government, and thus has repeatedly given, in our own history, a chance to an able woman to prove that in statesmanship, courage, sense of responsibility, and devotion to duty, she is capable of ruling in such a way as to strengthen her empire and throne by carrying the devoted affection of all classes of her subjects.

Twice in the history of England have extraordinary efforts been made to avert the supposed misfortune of a female heir to the throne; and twice has the “divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” decreed that these efforts should be in vain, and the dreaded national misfortune has turned out to be a great national blessing. Mr. Froude tells us that five out of Henry VIII.’s six marriages were contracted in consequence of his patriotic desire to secure the succession to the throne in the male line. But when the feeble flame of Edward VI.’s life was extinguished, four women stood next in the succession, and England acquired at a most critical moment of her history, in the person of Elizabeth, perhaps the greatest Sovereign who has ever occupied the throne of this country.

The second occasion was after the death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817. George III., with his fifteen children, had not then a single heir in the second generation. It would not be correct to say that the Royal Dukes were then married by Act of Parliament, no Act of Parliament was necessary; but political pressure was brought on them to marry, and Parliament granted them extra allowances of sums varying from £10,000 to £6,000 a year, and in May and June, 1818, the marriages took place of the Duke of Cambridge to the Princess Augusta of Hesse, of the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV.) to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, and of the Duke of Kent to Princess Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, widow of the Prince of Leiningen, and sister of Prince Leopold, the husband of Princess Charlotte. The marriage of the Duke of Kent is the only one of these that immediately concerns us. As the fourth son of George III., his children would, under ordinary circumstances, have had but a remote prospect of succeeding to the throne. But of his elder brothers, the Prince Regent had, in consequence of the death of Princess Charlotte, become childless, the Duke of York was also childless, the Duke of Clarence, whose marriage was contracted on the same day as that of the Duke of Kent, 13th June, 1818, took precedence of him as an elder brother, and if he had had legitimate heirs they would have succeeded to the throne. The Princess (afterwards Queen) Adelaide was not childless. She bore two children, but they died in their infancy; and thus the only child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the Princess Alexandrina Victoria, became heiress-presumptive of the English throne. The Duke of Kent took the strongest interest in his baby girl’s chances of the succession. Before the birth of the child he urged upon his wife, who was then resident at Amorbach in Bavaria, that the possible future King or Queen of England ought to be born on English soil, and then she consented to remove to Kensington; it is said he was so keenly anxious for her safety that he drove her carriage the whole of the land journey between Amorbach and Kensington with his own hands. At the present day we should perhaps say that the chances of safety lay with the professional rather than with the amateur coachman; but the Duke proved his efficiency in handling the reins, and brought his wife in safety to London, where, on the 24th May, 1819, the baby was born who is now Queen of England. It should be noted that the Duchess was attended in her confinement by a woman, following the custom of her own country in this matter, and that the same accoucheuse, Madam Charlotte Siebold, attended a few months later upon the Duchess of Coburg when she gave birth to the child who in after years became Prince Consort. There are several little anecdotes which illustrate the Duke of Kent’s appreciation of the important place his little girl was born to fill. He wanted the baby to be called Elizabeth, because it was the name of the greatest of England’s Queens, and therefore a popular name with the English people; there were, however, godfathers, Royal and Imperial, who overruled him as to the naming of the child. These were the Emperor of Russia (Alexander I.) and the Prince Regent, and it was therefore proposed to call the baby, Alexandrina Georgiana. But George, Prince Regent, objected to his name standing second to any other, however distinguished. His brother, on the other hand, insisted that Alexandrina should be the first of the baby’s names. In consequence of this dispute the little Princess was so fortunate as to escape bearing the name of Georgiana at all; when she was handed to the Archbishop at the font the Prince Regent only gave the name of Alexandrina. The baby’s father, however, intervened, and requested that another name might be added, with the result that, as a kind of afterthought, her mother’s name was, as it were, thrown in, and the little Princess was christened Alexandrina Victoria. It was in this way that the name Victoria, then almost unknown in England, was given to the baby, and has since become familiar in our mouths as household words. The Duke declined to allow the congratulations that were showered on him at the birth of his child to be tempered by regrets that the daughter was not a son. In reply to a letter conceived in this vein from his chaplain, Dr. Prince, the Duke wrote at the same time that “I assure you how truly sensible I am of the kind and flattering intentions of those who are prompted to express a degree of disappointment from the circumstance of the child not proving to be a son instead of a daughter. I feel it due to myself to declare that such sentiments are not in unison with my own, for I am decidedly of opinion that the decrees of Providence are at all times wisest and best.” As this was addressed to a clergyman and a Doctor of Divinity, it may be inferred that Her Majesty’s father was not without a sense of humor. Another story of the Duke is that, playing with his baby when she was a few months old, he held her high in his arms and said, “Look at her well, for she will be the Queen of England.” It must be remembered, however, that at this time there was no certainty that the children of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence would not survive the perils of infancy; moreover, if the Duke of Kent had lived to have a son, the boy would have become the heir in preference to his sister. The Duke’s strongly marked feeling of fatherly pride and affection is almost the only trait in his character by which we are able at this distance of time to conjure him up out of the mists of bygone years.[1] This feeling was soon to receive a melancholy illustration. The Duke and Duchess, with their baby daughter, removed from Kensington to Sidmouth to spend the winter of 1819-20. Returning home on a January day, with boots wet with snow, the Duke caught a severe chill from playing with his baby, instead of changing his boots.[2] The illness developed into acute pneumonia, of which he died in January, 1820, leaving his wife a stranger in a strange land, hardly able to speak the English language, sole guardian of England’s future Queen. The Duchess of Kent must have been a woman of considerable strength of character and power of will. She was in an extremely lonely and difficult position. Pecuniarily, her chief legacy from her husband consisted of his debts, which the allowance made then by Parliament was not sufficiently ample to enable her to pay.

Her brother, then Prince Leopold, widower of Princess Charlotte, and afterwards King of the Belgians, supplemented her income from his own purse. The Duchess and her children (she had two by her first marriage) were frequently his guests at Claremont and elsewhere, and the Queen speaks of these visits as the happiest periods of her childhood. After a few years the death of the children of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence made it practically certain that the Princess Victoria would become Queen. The Court of George IV. was not one which the Duchess of Kent could frequent with any satisfaction; she was on bad terms with him, and he often threatened to take her child away from her. His character made him quite capable of doing this; he was equally heartless and despotic. Matters were not greatly improved as to personal relations between the Sovereign and herself when William IV. became King; the Princess Victoria did not even attend his coronation. There was a strong feeling of antagonism between the Duchess of Kent and William IV., which occasionally broke out into very unseemly manifestations, especially on the King’s side. His was not a character which could claim respect, and still less evoke enthusiasm. As Duke of Clarence, he had lived for more than twenty years with Mrs. Jordan, the actress, by whom he had ten sons and daughters. His affection for them showed the best side of his character. He did not disown them; they bore the name of Fitz Clarence, and as soon as he was able he provided liberally for them. Greville says that his sons, with one exception, repaid his kindness with insolence and ingratitude. His affection for them did not prevent his desertion of their mother. He separated from her without any apparent cause, and endeavored to bring about a marriage between himself and a half-crazy woman of large fortune. The Prince Regent is said to have been the main plot of this scheme, which was never carried out. During the earlier part of his connection with Mrs. Jordan, the Duke of Clarence made her an allowance of £1,000 a year. At the suggestion of George III. he is said to have proposed by letter to Mrs. Jordan to reduce this sum to £500. Her reply was to send him the bottom part of a play-bill, on which were these words, “No money returned after the rising of the curtain.” When he was a young man on active service in the navy and in command of a ship, he had twice absented himself from foreign stations without leave, and the Admiralty were at their wits’ end to know how to deal with him.

The death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817, and later the death of the Duke of York, gave political importance to the Duke of Clarence’s existence, and he was one of the batch of Royal Dukes who married, as we have seen, in 1818, not without unseemly haggling with the House of Commons as to the additional allowance to be voted for his support. The £10,000 a year proposed by the Government was cut down to £6,000 by a vote of 193 to 184. Lord Castlereagh then rose and said that “Since the House had thought proper to refuse the larger sum to the Duke of Clarence, he believed he might say that the negotiation for the marriage might be considered at an end;” and on the next day his Lordship announced to the House that “the Duke declined availing himself of the inadequate sum which had been voted to him.” However, as the only practical reply to this was a vote by the House granting £6,000 a year to the Duke of Cambridge, and declining any grant at all for the unpopular Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Clarence appears to have thought better of his refusal of the grant, and the marriage accordingly took place. But there can be no surprise, under the circumstances, that such a union and the character it revealed awakened no popular interest. It should be said, however, that when he became King it was generally remarked that his elevation improved him. He became, Greville says, “most composed and rational, if not more dignified in his behavior.” People began to like him, if not for his virtues, at any rate on account of the contrast he presented to his predecessor. His best qualities were frankness and honesty, and he also had the real and rather rare generosity of not bearing a grudge against those who had baffled or defeated him. Thus the Duke of Wellington had, when Prime Minister, removed the Duke of Clarence from the office of Lord High Admiral; but though exceedingly angry at the time, he never bore any grudge against the Duke of Wellington, or wreaked vengeance upon him in any way when he had the power to do so. On the contrary, when he became King he gave the Duke his fullest and most cordial confidence, retained him as Prime Minister, and took an early opportunity of publicly showing him honor by dining at Apsley House. It is the more pleasant to recall this instance of magnanimity on the part of William IV. because the annals of the time are full to overflowing of stories to the discredit of nearly all the sons of George III. The character of George IV. is well known. His quarrels with his wife and attempt to pass an Act of Divorce against her are notorious. In ghastly contrast to the pageantry of his coronation, in which it was said £240,000 were spent, those who were present speak of the thrill of horror which ran through the assembly when Queen Caroline was heard knocking at the door of the Abbey for the admittance which was refused her. “There was sudden silence and consternation; it was like the handwriting on the wall.” George IV. was almost equally contemptible in every relation of life. His Ministers could with difficulty induce him to give attention to necessary business. “Indolent, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog” are the words by which he is described by the clerk of his Council. He delighted in keeping those who had business to transact with him waiting for hours while he was chatting about horses, or betting, or any trivial matter. Greville, after many years of close knowledge of George IV., says of him: “The littleness of his character prevents his displaying the dangerous faults that belong to great minds; but with vices and weaknesses of the lowest and most contemptible order it would be difficult to find a disposition more abundantly furnished.” It is probably not too much to say that no one loved him living, or mourned him dead. Of his funeral Greville says in his cynical way: “The attendance was not very numerous, and when they had all got together in St. George’s Hall, a gayer company I never beheld.... Merry were all, as merry as grigs.” The King’s brothers were not a very great improvement on the King. The Royal Dukes seemed to vie with each other in unseemly and indecorous behavior. On one occasion, in July, 1829, they attacked each other violently in the House of Lords, that is, “Clarence and Sussex attacked Cumberland, and he them very vehemently, and they used towards each other language which nobody else could have ventured to employ; so it was a very droll scene.” With such brothers-in-law the position of the Duchess of Kent must have been one of great difficulty and loneliness, and she was, consequently, thrown, more perhaps than she would otherwise have been, to rely for advice and companionship on her own brother, Prince Leopold. This Prince and his confidential secretary and friend, Stockmar, afterwards Baron Stockmar, were the trusted counsellors of the Duchess of Kent with regard to the education of Princess Victoria and her preparation for the difficult and responsible position she was afterwards to occupy. The quarrels and disputes that constantly arose between the Duchess of Kent and William IV. may have been attributable to faults on both sides; but the most innocent and indeed laudable actions of the Duchess, with regard to her daughter’s training, seem to have been made the excuse for all kinds of complaint and acrimony on the part of the King. For instance, the Duchess felt that it was proper that her daughter, in view of the position she would hereafter occupy, should see as much as possible of the places of interest and importance in the kingdom she would be destined in time to reign over. Accordingly, she took the young Princess about to the chief manufacturing centres, as well as to places of historic interest, and localities where the rural beauty of England was to be seen in its greatest perfection. In this way she visited Birmingham, Worcester, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Chester, Lichfield, and Oxford, as well as Malvern, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, Kenilworth, Powis Castle, Wynnstay, Anglesey, and the Isle of Wight. It appears, however, that these apparently praiseworthy proceedings gave great offence at Court. The Duchess was supposed to seek more attention than her position justified her in demanding. A Council was summoned at Windsor on one occasion (in 1833) for the sole purpose of checking the manifestations of loyalty which the appearance of the Duchess and her daughter provoked. The King was devoured by spleen on hearing that salutes had been fired at the Isle of Wight in honor of these progresses of the heiress-presumptive and her mother. After absurd negotiations on the subject between the King and his sister-in-law, when neither had the good grace to give way, the fleet was commanded, by Order in Council, not to salute the Royal Standard unless the King or Queen was on board. On another occasion, offence seems to have been taken by the King where none was intended, because an address, received by the Duchess in 1835 at Burghley, alluded to her daughter as “destined to mount the throne of these realms.” It was an additional offence that Sir John Conroy, the Duchess’s controller of the household, “handed the answer, just as the Prime Minister does to the King.” With every action, even on the part of others, thus misinterpreted, it was no wonder that the Duchess could have no cordial feelings towards her husband’s family. George IV. openly showed his dislike for her, the Duke of Cumberland never lost an opportunity of aggravating the unfriendliness of their relations. When William IV. succeeded, the Duchess of Kent wrote to the Duke of Wellington, as Prime Minister, to request that she might be treated as a Dowager Princess of Wales, with an income suitable for herself and her daughter, for whom she also asked recognition as heiress to the throne. These requests met with a positive refusal, at which the Duchess expressed considerable vexation. Afterwards, when a Regency Bill was brought forward to provide for the event of the death of the King while the Princess Victoria was still a minor, although the right thing was done, and the Duchess was named Regent, the old feeling of hostility was not removed between herself and the King and his brothers, and during nearly the whole of William IV.’s seven years’ reign there were constant bickerings and disputes between Windsor and Kensington. Matters were made worse by William’s love of making speeches, in which he set forth, with more vigor than dignity, his grievances, or what he considered such. Greville says he had a passion for speechifying, and had a considerable facility in expressing himself, but that what he said was generally useless or improper. An instance in point is to be found in the “Life of Archbishop Tait,” who wrote in his diary, December 4th, 1856, that Dr. Langley told him that when he did homage to William IV. on his first appointment as Bishop, no sooner had he risen from his knees than the King suddenly addressed him in a loud voice thus: “Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d——d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England.” Even when proposing the Princess Victoria’s health and speaking kindly of her, he could not resist the public announcement that he had not seen so much of her as he could have wished (Aug., 1836). On another occasion he loudly and publicly expressed to the Duchess his strong disapprobation of her having appropriated apartments at Kensington Palace beyond those which had been assigned to her, and spoke of what she had done as “an unwarrantable liberty.” A still worse outbreak shortly followed. At his birthday banquet in 1836, in the presence of a hundred people, with the Duchess of Kent sitting next to him and the Princess Victoria opposite, he expressed with more vigor than delicacy the hope that he might live nine months longer, so that the Princess might attain her majority, and the regency of the Duchess never come into operation. He referred to the Duchess as “a person now near me who is surrounded by evil advisers, and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed.” A great deal more in the same style followed; “an awful philippic,” Greville calls it, “uttered with a loud voice and excited manner.” The King’s animosity against the Duchess was extended to, and may perhaps have been provoked by, her brother. He had given offence by calling on Queen Caroline after the conclusion of the evidence against her in the House of Lords. He appears himself to have thought the action required an excuse, and says, “But how abandon entirely the mother of Princess Charlotte, who, though she knew her mother well, loved her very much?” George IV. was furious, and never forgave his son-in-law. William IV. shared his brother’s sentiments in regard to Leopold, and invariably treated him with coldness, and sometimes with rudeness that amounted to brutality. After he had become King of the Belgians, Leopold visited William IV. at Windsor, and during dinner made an innocent request for water. The King asked, “What’s that you are drinking, sir?” “Water, sir.” “God d—— it!” rejoined the other King, “why don’t you drink wine? I never allow any one to drink water at my table.” The King of the Belgians must have felt like a man living among wild beasts, and it is not surprising to read that he did not sleep at Windsor that night, but went away in the evening. There was not a subject on which they were agreed. William IV. was a Tory of the Tories; Prince Leopold was a Whig. King William’s chief political interest was the preservation of the slave trade; Prince Leopold was deeply interested in its abolition. The same antagonism between them ran through all subjects, great and small.

These anecdotes of the coarseness and brutality of the Queen’s immediate predecessors have been recalled for the purpose of illustrating the extreme difficulty of the position in which the Duchess of Kent found herself from the time of her husband’s death to that of her daughter’s accession. It also serves to explain an expression used in after years by the Queen in reference to her choice of the name of Leopold for her youngest son, where she says, “It is the name which is dearest to me after Albert, one which recalls the almost only happy days of my sad childhood.” But if the Princess Victoria was unfortunate in some of her uncles, her uncle Leopold went far to redress the balance. At one time the prospect before him, as husband of Princess Charlotte, had been identical with the position afterwards occupied by Prince Albert. He had become a naturalized Englishman, and he had given great thought and study to English Constitutional history, and particularly to the duties and responsibilities of a Constitutional monarch. He had strong personal ambition, disciplined by ability and conscientiousness. In 1817 the death of his wife dashed the cup of ambition from his lips. A contemporary letter speaks of him as Adam “turned out of Paradise without his Eve.” From the important position of husband of the Heiress Apparent he sunk in one day to that of a subordinate member of the Royal Family, necessarily, as we have seen, out of sympathy with them and aloof from them. “Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not,” was the lesson of 1817 to him. With great power of personal abnegation, his disappointment did not imbitter him, his ambition did not turn sour. He transferred it and all his plans and all his interest in English constitutionalism to a little niece and nephew who were born respectively on the 24th of May and 26th of August, 1819. The little Victoria at Kensington and the little Albert at Coburg were destined by their uncle Leopold almost from their birth to play the part that would have been filled by the Princess Charlotte and himself but for her early death. He had, of course, no absolute power to bring this marriage about, but he earnestly desired it, and prepared the way for it by every means at his command. He won, as he deserved to win, the Princess Victoria’s most ardent affection. She has told us herself how she “adored” her uncle. He took his mother, the Duchess Dowager of Coburg, a very able woman, into his confidence. She wholly shared his views and hopes. From the time he was three years old Prince Albert was accustomed to the idea that when he was old enough he was to marry his cousin, Princess Victoria of England. The first mention of Prince Albert as a husband was made to the Queen by her uncle Leopold. The education of both children was conducted with this end in view. This was no doubt a chief bone of contention between Prince Leopold and his sister the Duchess of Kent on the one hand, and the King and his party on the other. For William IV. highly disapproved of the proposed union, and did everything in his power to stop it, proposing in succession no fewer than five other marriages for the young Princess. It throws a light too on his resentment at the degree to which the Princess Victoria was withdrawn from his Court, so that hardly any influence could reach her antagonistic to that of her uncle Leopold. William IV.’s explosions of rage against the Duchess of Kent are illustrative of this; they are those of a stupid man, nominally in a position of authority, but baffled and outwitted, and consequently furious. It was well for the Princess Victoria and for England too that he was not the predominant influence in her education; but it is not difficult to understand his wrath. The game of cross purposes was constantly going on, and the King was constantly being worsted. The Duchess of Kent selected as her daughter’s tutor the Rev. George Davys. The King objected that the education of the heiress-presumptive to the throne should be under the care of some distinguished prelate. The Duchess acquiesced, and, while retaining the services of Dr. Davys, intimated that there would be no objection on her part to his receiving the highest ecclesiastical preferment. A very extensive knowledge of human nature is not needed to know that this sort of thing is to the last degree irritating, nor that the fact of the Duchess and her brother being generally in the right, and the King generally in the wrong, was not soothing to the latter.[3]

In this too stormy atmosphere the heiress of England was reared. Her naturally happy disposition and healthy physical constitution carried her through with less disadvantage than other less happily endowed natures would have sustained. Among other relatives who were uniformly kind and considerate to the young Princess special mention should be made of the Duke of York, whom she loved like a second father. His death, in 1827, was her first real sorrow as a child. Queen Adelaide also was uniformly kind and loving to her niece. Her own two baby girls had died in their infancy, and she transferred a good deal of motherly tenderness to Princess Victoria. A meaner nature would have resented the place of her own child being filled by another; but Queen Adelaide showed none of this littleness, and welcomed her niece with cordiality to her rightful place beside the throne. When the second of Queen Adelaide’s own little girls died, she wrote to the Duchess of Kent, “My children are dead, but yours lives, and she is mine, too!” The simple words give the note of a truly noble nature. In 1831, when King William prorogued his first Parliament, Queen Adelaide and Princess Victoria watched from the windows of the Palace the progress of the Royal procession. “The people cheered the Queen lustily, but, forgetting herself, that gracious lady took the young Princess Victoria by the hand, led her to the front of the balcony, and introduced her to the happy and loyal multitude.”[4] On several other occasions Queen Adelaide showed a noble, queenly, and motherly spirit towards the young Princess. In 1837 and onwards, Queen Victoria was able, by a number of little nameless acts of kindness and of love, to cheer and soothe the declining years of the Queen Dowager.

[1] The Duke of Kent was chiefly known in the army for his extreme insistence in military etiquette, discipline, dress, and equipments. He was, however, the first to abandon flogging, and to establish a regimental school.—Dictionary of National Biography.

[2] In reminiscences contributed by the King of the Belgians, as an appendix to “Early Years of the Prince Consort,” it is stated that the Duke’s fatal cold was caught when visiting Salisbury Cathedral.

[3] It should be remarked that whatever the faults and shortcomings of William IV. may have been, the Queen herself never refers to him but in terms of affection and gratitude.

[4] G. Barnett Smith, “Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.”

CHAPTER II.
CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION.

The previous chapter dwelt upon some serious drawbacks to the Queen’s happiness as a child. But if she was unfortunate in living in an atmosphere too highly charged with contention, her childhood was in another respect remarkably fortunate. Very few heirs to the throne have been brought up from infancy with an education carefully designed as a preparation for their future exalted station, combined with almost all the simplicity and domesticity of private life. But this unusual combination was secured for the Queen by the circumstances of her childhood. At the time of her birth the chances were decidedly against her succession. Even down to the last few months of his life, William IV. continued to speak of her as “Heiress Presumptive,” not as “Heiress Apparent” to the throne. He never probably completely relinquished the hope of having a child of his own to succeed him. In 1835 there had been rumors, which seemed well authenticated, that Queen Adelaide was about to give birth to a child. The absence of absolute certainty in the Princess Victoria’s prospects of the succession, the reluctance of her uncles and of Parliament to establish her and her mother with an income suitable to their rank and her future position, all worked together, in combination with the good sense of her mother, to secure for the little Princess a childhood free from much of the pomp, formality, and flattery from which an heir to the throne seldom even partially escapes.

While she was thus protected from many of the disadvantages associated with her rank, its advantages were not neglected. The Duchess of Kent gathered about her at Kensington Palace a great many of the representatives of the foremost minds of the day in literature, science, and in social reform. Nearly all the memoirs of distinguished men and women of that period contain some mention of their gracious reception at Kensington Palace by the Duchess, and the interest they had felt in seeing the little Princess. Among those who were received in this way may be mentioned Sir Walter Scott, Wilberforce, and Mrs. Somerville.

The Duchess of Kent made the suitable education of her child the one absorbing object of her life; and she seems to have realized that education does not consist in merely learning facts or acquiring accomplishments, but should also aim at forming the character and disciplining the whole nature, so that it may acquire conscientiousness and the strength which comes from self-government. Keeping this end ever in view, and aided, no doubt, by a responsiveness in the child’s own nature, the little Princess was trained in those habits of strict personal integrity which are the only unfailing safeguard for truthfulness and fundamental honesty in regard to money and other possessions. All observers who have been brought into personal relationship with the Queen speak of her as possessing one of the most transparently truthful natures they have ever known. The Right Hon. John Bright, with his Quaker-bred traditions as to literal exactitude in word and deed, said that this was the trait in her character of which he carried away the most vivid impression. An anecdote is given in “The Life of Bishop Wilberforce,” illustrative of the Queen’s truthfulness as a child. Dr. Davys, Bishop of Peterborough, formerly preceptor to Princess Victoria, told Dr. Wilberforce that when he was teaching her, one day the little Princess was very anxious that the lesson should be over, and was rather troublesome. The Duchess of Kent came in and asked how she had behaved. Baroness Lehzen, the governess, replied that once she had been rather naughty. The Princess touched her and said, “No, Lehzen, twice; don’t you remember?”

The financial side of truthfulness is honesty; and here again the Queen has instituted a new order of things in English royalty. We are so accustomed to the sway of a Sovereign who regards it as dishonest to owe more than she is ready and willing to pay, that we have almost forgotten that this was very far from being the case with her predecessors. Even the highly respectable Prince Leopold could not live within his income of £50,000 a year, and was £83,000 in debt when he became King of the Belgians in 1831.

Great attention was given to exactitude with regard to money in the Queen’s early training. There are many stories of the little Princess visiting shops and relinquishing some desired purchase because she had not money enough to pay for it. One of these anecdotes is preserved at Tunbridge Wells, and tells how the Princess Victoria, not having money enough to buy some greatly desired toy, so far went beyond her accustomed self-control as to ask the shopkeeper to reserve it for her till she had received a fresh instalment of her allowance for pocket-money, and that the child came on her donkey as early as seven o’clock in the morning to claim possession of the object she had set her heart on, the very instant she had the money to pay for it. Perhaps these lessons had their source from the frugal German Court of Coburg; but whatever their origin, they have stood the Queen in good stead, and have enabled her to set a perpetual good example to her subjects of the blessedness of obedience to the injunction, “owe no man anything.” It must not be forgotten, too, that she was not, throughout her girlhood, without an object lesson in the disagreeable consequences of extravagance. Her father had died in debt, and unless his creditors differed from the race of creditors in general, they did not fail during the seventeen years which elapsed between the Duke’s death and his daughter’s accession to remind his widow of the fact. One of the first acts of the young Queen on ascending the throne was to pay her father’s debts, contracted before she was born.

The scrupulousness with regard to money which was enjoined on her as a child has been one of the Queen’s many claims to the loyalty of her people. Miss Martineau, in her “Thirty Years’ Peace” (written about 1845), speaking of this aspect of Her Majesty’s education and character, has said, “Such things are no trifles. The energy and conscientiousness brought out by such training are blessings to a whole people; and a multitude of her more elderly subjects, to this day, feel a sort of delighted surprise as every year goes by without any irritation on any hand about regal extravagance—without any whispered stories of loans to the Sovereign—without any mournful tales of ruined tradesmen and exasperated creditors.”

A trifling circumstance may here be mentioned illustrative of the Queen’s economy in personal expenditure. A Paris dressmaker, of world-wide fame, recently (1893) brought an action against a rival who was trading under the same name. In the course of evidence given at the trial the celebrated modiste stated that he had made dresses for every Royal lady in Europe except Her Majesty the Queen of England. Indeed, every one who has seen the Queen, either in public or private, will agree that she is not indebted either to the dressmaker or milliner for the regal dignity which undoubtedly marks her bearing.

Of the Queen’s personal appearance as a child and young woman we have many contemporary records. Some of these speak in enthusiastic terms of her extreme loveliness as a child. One lady writes of a recent visit to the widowed Duchess: “The child is so noble and magnificent a creature that one cannot help feeling an inward conviction that she is to be Queen some day or other.” Other writers speak of her lovely complexion, fair hair, and large expressive eyes. Greville is less complimentary; but he was writing of a later period. Speaking of a child’s ball given at Court for the little Queen of Portugal in 1829, he says: “It was pretty enough, and I saw for the first time ... our little Victoria.... Our little Princess is a short, plain-looking child, and not near so good-looking as the Portuguese.” It was when this ball was first talked of that Lady Maria Conyngham gave dire offence to George IV. by saying, “Do give it, sir; it will be so nice to see the two little Queens dancing together.” There is no necessary inconsistency in these different accounts of Princess Victoria’s appearance. It is possible that a lovely infant may have become a plain child at ten years old. Of her appearance as she approached womanhood, Mr. N. P. Willis, an American, writing in 1835, describing his visit to Ascot, says: “In one of the intervals I walked under the King’s stand, and saw Her Majesty the Queen (Adelaide) and the young Princess Victoria very distinctly. They were leaning over the railing, listening to a ballad-singer, and seeming to be as much interested and amused as any simple country folk would be.... The Princess is much better looking than any picture of her in the shops, and for the heir to such a crown as that of England, quite unnecessarily pretty and interesting.”

Victoria Aug: 10^th 1835.

Carlyle, in a private letter to his brother (April, 1838), gave a vivid picture of the girl-Queen as he saw her then:—

“Going through the Green Park yesterday, I saw her little Majesty taking her ... departure for Windsor. I had seen her another day at Hyde Park Corner coming in from the daily ride. She is decidedly a pretty-looking little creature: health, clearness, graceful timidity, looking out from her young face, ‘frail cockle on the black bottomless deluges.’ One could not help some interest in her, situated as mortal seldom was.”

Writing of a later period, Baroness Bunsen, describing the scene in the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament in 1842, says:—

“The opening of Parliament was the thing from which I expected most, and I was not disappointed. The throngs in the streets, in the windows, in every place people could stand upon, all looking so pleased; the splendid Horse Guards, the Grenadiers of the Guard ... the Yeomen of the Body-Guard. Then in the House of Lords, the Peers in their robes, the beautifully dressed ladies with many very beautiful faces; lastly, the procession of the Queen’s entry, and herself, looking worthy and fit to be the converging point of so many rays of grandeur. It is self-evident that she is not tall, but were she ever so tall, she could not have more grace and dignity.... The composure with which she filled the throne while awaiting the Commons I much admired; it was a test—no fidget, no apathy. Then her voice and enunciation cannot be more perfect. In short, it cannot be said that she did well, but that she was the Queen,—she was and felt herself to be the descendant of her ancestors.”

These last words exactly describe Her Majesty’s bearing in age as well as in youth; and it is this, her intellectual grasp of the situation she fills as the highest officer of the State and the wearer of the crown of the Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, that renders her dignity so entirely independent of mere trappings and finery. It has been remarked that on the occasion of her public appearances, the Queen may have been the worst-dressed lady present, and have had by her side or in the immediate background a galaxy of fair women dressed with all the art that Paris or London could command, and yet she has looked every inch the Queen, and they have looked milliner’s advertisements. She has over and over again proved that the saying, “Fine feathers make fine birds,” is not universally true.

In those portions of the Queen’s Journals which have been published, evidence is not wanting of that pride of race which, if we have interpreted it aright, is the true source of Her Majesty’s dignity of bearing. On one of her journeys through the Highlands, General Ponsonby reminded her that the great-great-grandfathers of the men who were showing her every possible mark of loyalty and affection, had lost their heads for trying to dethrone the Queen’s great-great-grandfather. “Yes,” adds the Queen, “and I feel a sort of reverence in going over these scenes in this most beautiful country which I am proud to call my own, where there was such devoted loyalty to the family of my ancestors; for Stuart blood is in my veins, and I am now their representative, and the people are as devoted and loyal to me as they were to that unhappy race.”

Returning to the subject of the influence of the Queen’s early education and character, the remarkable degree to which her natural conscientiousness was developed is noticeable in a great variety of directions. Her extreme punctuality is an instance in point. She never wastes the time of others by keeping them waiting for her. Punctuality has been described as “the courtesy of kings,” and it is a courtesy in which the Queen is unfailing. Her care for her servants and household is another manifestation of her conscientiousness. Her “Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands,” and the subsequent book, “More Leaves,” are full of little touches illustrative of the Queen’s care for those dependent upon her, and her readiness to acknowledge the value of their services. Sir Arthur Helps, writing the introduction to the first of these volumes, draws attention to this feature of the Queen’s character. He says: “Perhaps there is no person in these realms who takes a more deep and abiding interest in the welfare of the household committed to his charge than our gracious Queen does in hers, or who feels more keenly what are the reciprocal duties of masters and servants.”

In one of the Queen’s letters to Dean Stanley, on the occasion of the death of a valued servant of his, she says: “I am one of those who think the loss of a faithful servant the loss of a friend, and one who can never be replaced.” In 1858, on their first journey to Prussia, to visit the Princess Royal after her marriage, the Queen and Prince heard of the sudden death of a valuable servant of the latter, who had been with him since his childhood. The Queen wrote in her Journal: “I turn sick now in writing it.... He died suddenly on Saturday at Morges of angina pectoris. I burst into tears. All day long the tears would rush every moment to my eyes, and this dreadful reality came to throw a gloom over the long-wished-for day of meeting with our dear child.... I cannot think of my dear husband without Cart! He seemed part of himself. We were so thankful for and proud of this good, faithful old servant.... A sad breakfast we had indeed.”[5]

The Duchess of Kent made the education of the Princess her one end and aim during the minority of the latter. She was hardly ever out of her mother’s sight, sleeping in her mother’s room, having her supper, at a little table, by the side of her mother at dinner. She was instructed in the usual educational subjects, besides, what was then unusual for a girl, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. From an early age she spoke French and German with fluency; the latter indeed was almost another mother tongue. All her life she has shown delight in languages, and her subjects, especially those in Asia, were very interested to hear that, even in old age, she had begun to make a systematic study of Hindustani. From an early age she acquired considerable proficiency in drawing and music, and developed in youth a pleasant mezzo-soprano voice. One of Mendelssohn’s letters to his family describes his visit to the Queen and Prince Consort at Buckingham Palace in 1842. She offered to sing one of his songs, and he handed her the album to choose one. “And which,” writes Mendelssohn, “did she choose? ‘Schöner und schöner schmäckt sich’!” The exclamation mark is due to the fact that this song was not by Mendelssohn at all, but by his sister Fanny. Germany in the forties would have been scandalized by a woman’s name on the titlepage even of a song, so that Mendelssohn’s album of songs was enriched by those which had been composed by his sister. The letter continues: “She [the Queen] sang it quite charmingly, in strict time and tune, and with very good execution. Only ... where it goes down to D and comes up again chromatically she sang D sharp each time.... With the exception of this little mistake, it was really charming, and the last long G I never heard better, or purer, or more natural from any amateur. Then I was obliged to confess that Fanny had written the song (which I found very hard, but pride must have a fall), and begged her to sing one of my own also.”

In the Queen’s early childhood the knowledge that she was the probable heir to the throne was carefully kept from her. In Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” the following entry is given from Scott’s Journal, May 19th, 1828: “Dined with the Duchess of Kent. I was very kindly received by Prince Leopold, and presented to the Princess Victoria, the Heir Apparent to the crown, as things now stand.... This little lady is educating with much care, and watched so closely that no busy maid has a moment to whisper, ‘You are heir of England.’ I suspect if we could dissect the little heart we should find some pigeon or other bird of the heir had carried the matter.” The Queen has given her own authority for saying that this very natural surmise was mistaken, and has allowed the publication of the following letter from Her Majesty’s governess, Baroness Lehzen, which contains one of the most interesting anecdotes of the Queen’s childhood.

The Regency Bill, which made the Duchess of Kent Regent in the event of the death of William IV. without direct heirs while the Princess was still a minor, was passing through Parliament in 1830, and the occasion suggested to the governess that the time had come when her little charge should be made aware of her prospect of succeeding to the throne. Baroness Lehzen wrote in a letter to the Queen, dated 2nd December, 1867:—

“I then said to the Duchess of Kent that now, for the first time, your Majesty ought to know your place in the succession. Her Royal Highness agreed with me, and I put the genealogical table into the historical book. When Mr. Davys [the Queen’s instructor, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough] was gone, the Princess Victoria opened the book again as usual, and, seeing the additional paper, said, ‘I never saw that before.’ ‘It was not thought necessary you should, Princess,’ I answered. ‘I see I am nearer the throne than I thought.’ ‘So it is, madam,’ I said. After some moments the Princess answered, ‘Now, many a child would boast; but they don’t know the difficulty. There is much splendor, but there is more responsibility.’ The Princess, having lifted up the forefinger of her right hand while she spoke, gave me that little hand, saying, ‘I will be good. I understand why you urged me so much to learn, even Latin. My aunts Augusta and Mary never did, but you told me that Latin is the foundation of English grammar and of all the elegant expressions, and I learned it as you wished it; but I understand all better now.’ And the Princess gave me her hand, repeating, ‘I will be good.’”

This anecdote gives the key-note to the Queen’s character. Her childish resolve, I will be good, has been the secret of her strength throughout her reign. She has never shrunk from anything which has presented itself to her in the light of a duty. When she became Queen she did not go through her business in a perfunctory way, giving her signature without question to whatever documents were placed before her. She required all the State business explained to her to such a degree that Lord Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, said laughingly that he would rather manage ten kings than one queen. On one occasion, in the early years of her reign, the Minister urged her to sign some document on the grounds of “expediency.” She looked up quietly, and said, “I have been taught to judge between what is right and what is wrong, but ‘expediency’ is a word I neither wish to hear nor to understand.” Another word which she objected to was “trouble.” Mrs. Jameson relates that one of the Ministers told her that he once carried the Queen some papers to sign, and said something about managing so as to give Her Majesty “less trouble.” She looked up from her papers, and said, “Pray never let me hear those words again; never mention the word ‘trouble.’ Only tell me how the thing is to be done and done rightly, and I will do it if I can.” This has been her principle throughout her reign: to do her work as well as she knew how to do it, without sparing herself either trouble or responsibility.

It is not only the larger questions of State policy that she follows now, after more than fifty years of sovereignty, with all the knowledge which long experience gives, but she bestows close attention to the details of organization in the different departments of the Government. If any change is proposed of which she does not see the bearing or the necessity, she requires to have the reasons which prompted it laid before her, and would withhold her sanction unless her judgment were convinced. She is a constant and indefatigable worker, and those in attendance upon her have frequently expressed their surprise at her continuing at her work late into the night, and yet being almost unfailingly at her post again in the early morning. The child raising her little hand, and saying, “I will be good,” has been in this and in many other ways the mother to the woman. The solemn words of the Coronation Service have not been profaned by her as so many monarchs have profaned them. The Archbishop, delivering the Sword of State into the Sovereign’s hand at the Coronation, says: “Receive this kingly sword, brought now from the altar of God, and delivered to you by the hands of us, the servants and bishops of God, though unworthy. With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order; that doing these things you may be glorious in all virtue, and so faithfully serve our Lord Jesus Christ in this life that you may reign forever with Him in the life which is to come.” All through the Queen’s reign these words have been turned into actions; they have inspired her to do her duty faithfully and courageously and with unfailing self-sacrifice of her own inclinations and wishes. By so living she has revived the feeling of personal affection and loyalty to the throne on the part of her subjects which her immediate predecessors had done much to destroy. When we reflect upon the contrast which the pure-minded, pure-hearted girl presented to them we shall be able to understand something of the keen emotion of joyful loyalty which was evoked at her accession. But this will be the subject of the next chapter.

[5] Life of the Prince Consort, vi. 280, 281.

CHAPTER III.
ACCESSION TO THE THRONE.

It is not easy to realize that in the lifetime of our own fathers and mothers there was in England a plot to change the succession and secure the crown for the “wicked uncle,” to the exclusion of the rightful heir. The whole story savors of romance, or at any rate of a much earlier period in our history, when John Lackland or Richard the Hunchback cheated their young nephews of crown and life. Yet the evidence of history on this point is unmistakable. In 1835 a plot was discovered and laid bare in Parliament, mainly by Joseph Hume, which had for its aim to secure the crown for the Duke of Cumberland and set aside the claims of Princess Victoria. The Duke, to do him justice, does not seem to have supposed that his personal merits and attractions would cause him to be made king by acclamation. But he appears to have thought he could ride in on the top of a wave of fanaticism got up over a No-popery cry. The passing of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 by the Tory Government of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel was not accomplished without a great deal of real terror and misgiving that this act of plain justice to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects was a breaking down of the barriers against Papal aggression, and that it was merely a step towards undoing the work of the Reformation. Orange Lodges, which up to that time had little vigorous existence out of Ireland, spread all over England, and were formed even in the army. The Duke of Cumberland, a precious champion for any sort of religion, was their grand master. But he was not inconsistent: he had his own personal aggrandizement in view, and appealed to fanaticism, bigotry, and ignorance to help him to attain it. If he was acting a part, he understood his own character, and was not acting out of it. But he and the Orange Lodges too completely misunderstood the nation they were living in. The saying of Charles II. to his brother, afterwards James II., might have shown them their mistake: “They will never kill me to make you king.” When hard pressed by political necessity, the English people have not shrunk from revolutionary changes in their constitution; but they would never have embarked on a revolution with the object of placing Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, on the throne. The ridiculous plot was rendered still more ridiculous by the assertion made by the conspirators that they feared the Duke of Wellington intended to seize the crown for himself;[6] that the Iron Duke, the most sternly upright and devotedly loyal of subjects, meant to depose William IV., set aside the little Princess Victoria, and become Emperor of the English, as Bonaparte had become Emperor of the French. The assertion had only to be made, and made publicly, to be drowned in the ridicule it excited. However, the plot of the Orange Lodges, the Duke of Cumberland’s association with it, the unveiling of the scheme in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume, and Lord John Russell’s masterly dealing with the whole matter, was a nine days’ wonder in 1835. An address to the King was unanimously agreed to, praying him to dissolve the Orange Lodges; even the Orangemen in the House assented to this, and Greville says Lord John’s dignified eloquence melted them to tears. The Duke of Cumberland, seeing which way his cat had jumped, hastened to assure the Home Secretary that the dissolution of the societies of which he was Grand Master had his entire approval and acquiescence, and the whole of the foolish business appeared at an end.

But this was not so. The elements of disturbance were quite genuine, and had not been removed even by a resolution of the House of Commons: these were the Duke of Cumberland’s treachery and his No-popery nightmare. The original scheme had been to depose William IV. on the pretext that his giving the Royal Assent to the Reform Bill of 1832 was a symptom of insanity; the next step, the setting aside of the claims of Princess Victoria, was rendered attractive to the Duke of Cumberland by the fact that she was a girl, and young; when, therefore, in 1837, William IV. was removed by death, another futile attempt was made to raise the No-popery cry against the accession of the Queen. Her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, had recently married Louise, daughter of Louis Philippe, a Roman Catholic Princess. Another member of the Coburg family, Prince Ferdinand, cousin of Prince Albert, had also, quite recently, made a Roman Catholic marriage with Maria, Queen of Portugal. This at any rate showed that the Coburg family, who were known to have great influence with Princess Victoria, were not so exclusively Protestant as the Royal Family of England. But high as party feeling ran at the time, the bare suspicion that any treachery was intended to the young Queen caused a popular outburst of passionate loyalty such as had not been seen since the House of Brunswick had reigned in England. The warmth of this feeling in the curious warp and woof of human affairs was increased by the fact that to be ardently devoted to the young Queen was to be ardently opposed to all the works and ways of the Duke of Cumberland, to be in favor of religious liberty and toleration, to support the Reform Bill and the abolition of slavery. It was Whig to be loyal to the Queen, Tory to be, if not disloyal, full of doubts and fears, imagining that with a young girl at the helm, known to be in sympathy with Whig principles, the ship of State was bound to split on anarchy and popery. These fears very soon disappeared as the Queen showed she had a mind and will of her own, and was no mere puppet in the hands of her Ministers. If at the outset of her reign she showed strong Whig tendencies, she was not long in grasping the fact that, as Sovereign, she was Queen of the whole people, and not the mere head of a party.

There was, however, enough of revolutionary storm in the atmosphere to justify the Times in endeavoring to allay the fears of the ultra-Protestant party by reminding them that for the Queen to turn Papist, “or in any manner to follow the footsteps of the Coburg family” in marrying a Papist, “would involve an immediate forfeiture of the British Crown.” This situation of affairs had the rather curious result of making the Irish among the most intensely loyal of the young Queen’s subjects. O’Connell’s stentorian voice was heard leading the cheers of the crowd outside St. James’s Palace on the day she was proclaimed Queen. He declared later, in a public speech, that if it were necessary he could get “five hundred thousand brave Irishmen to defend the life, the honor, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom England’s throne is now filled.” Mr. Harry Grattan, son of the famous orator of the Irish Parliament of 1782-1800, thought the Tories so bent on the Queen’s destruction that “If Her Majesty were once placed in the hands of the Tories, I would not give an orange-peel for her life.” The expression “orange-peel” was, no doubt, a reference to the soubriquet his Irish opponents had bestowed upon Sir Robert Peel on account of his stanch Protestantism.

These extraordinary ebullitions of party feeling would be hardly worth recording but for the explanation they afford of subsequent events relating to the establishment of Prince Albert, and for the curious contrast they offer to the feelings of political parties at the present time. They also explain why quiet, peace-loving people, taking no special interest in party politics, were so devoutly thankful that the operation of the Salic law in Hanover separated that kingdom from the Crown of England and enabled us to get quit of the Duke of Cumberland. No paper and no party ever pretended to regret him; indeed, it must have become abundantly obvious that his departure was, in a special degree, advantageous to his own party. He could be nothing but a source of weakness to them. “A man’s foes are those of his own household” is even more true of political than of private affairs. The anxiety of the Tories to get rid of the Duke of Cumberland is well illustrated by one of Greville’s anecdotes. When the late King (William IV.) had evidently only a few days to live, the Duke of Cumberland consulted the Duke of Wellington as to what he should do. “I told him the best thing he could do was to go away as fast as he could. ‘Go instantly,’ I said, ‘and take care you don’t get pelted.’” He did go instantly, and his first act as King of Hanover was to suspend the constitution of the country and turn out of their chairs in Göttingen University seven distinguished professors for the crime of holding Liberal opinions. No wonder the Duke of Wellington felt this sort of Toryism would manufacture Liberals and Radicals by the thousand in England.

The story has often been told of how the Queen received the news of her accession, and of the extraordinarily favorable impression she produced by the youthful dignity and grace with which she presided at her first Council.

William IV. expired at Windsor about 2.30 A. M. on Tuesday, June 20th, 1837. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley, and the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquis of Conyngham, almost immediately “set out to announce the event to their young Sovereign. They reached Kensington Palace at about five; they knocked, they rang, they thumped for a considerable time before they could rouse the porter at the gates. They were again kept waiting in the courtyard, then turned into one of the lower rooms, where they seemed to be forgotten by everybody. They rang the bell, and desired that the attendant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform H. R. H. that they requested an audience on business of importance. After another delay, and another ringing to inquire the cause, the attendant was summoned, who stated that the Princess was in such a sweet sleep she could not venture to disturb her. They then said, ‘We are come to the Queen on business of State, and even her sleep must give way to that.’ It did; and to prove that she did not keep them waiting, in a few minutes she came into the room in a loose white nightgown and shawl, her nightcap thrown off, and her hair falling on her shoulders, her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected and dignified.”[7] Another account states that the Queen’s first words to the Archbishop on hearing his announcement were, “I beg your Grace to pray for me,” and that her first request to her mother after she had learned that she was Queen was that she might be left for two hours quite alone. On the same day, about eleven o’clock in the morning, she held her first Council; and it may be noted that in Miss Wynn’s account of this ceremony it is stated that the first of her subjects who paid her homage was the Duke of Cumberland, who knelt and kissed her hand. “I suppose,” says Miss Wynn, “he was not King of Hanover when he knelt to her.” The Diarist goes on to mention that the next to offer homage was the Duke of Sussex; but the young Queen would not allow him to kneel, but rose herself and kissed him on the forehead. This, however, differs slightly from Greville’s account of the Queen’s first Council, which must be now quoted:—

“June 21st. The King died at twenty minutes after two yesterday morning, and the young Queen met the Council at Kensington Palace at eleven. Never was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which is raised about her manner and behavior, and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordinary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion, and there was a considerable assemblage at the Palace, notwithstanding the short notice that was given. The first thing to be done was to teach her her lesson, which, for this purpose, Melbourne had himself to learn. I gave him the Council papers, and explained all that was to be done; and he went and explained all this to her. He asked her if she would come into the room accompanied by the great officers of State, but she said she would come in alone. When the Lords were assembled the Lord President informed them of the King’s death, and suggested, as they were so numerous, that a few of them should repair to the presence of the Queen and inform her of the event, and that their Lordships were assembled in consequence; and accordingly the two Royal Dukes, the two Archbishops, the Chancellor, and Melbourne went with him. The Queen received him in the adjoining room alone. As soon as they had returned, the proclamation was read and the usual order passed, when the doors were thrown open and the Queen entered, accompanied by her two uncles, who advanced to meet her. She bowed to the Lords, took her seat, and then read her speech in a clear, distinct, and audible voice, and without any appearance of fear or embarrassment. She was quite plainly dressed, and in mourning. After she had read her speech and taken and signed the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, the Privy Councillors were sworn, the two Royal Dukes first by themselves; and as these two old men, her uncles, knelt before her, swearing allegiance and kissing her hand, I saw her blush up to the eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural relations. This was the only sign of emotion which she evinced. Her manner to them was very graceful and engaging; she kissed them both, and rose from her chair and moved towards the Duke of Sussex, who was farthest from her, and too infirm to reach her. She seemed rather bewildered at the multitude of men who were sworn, and who came, one after another, to kiss her hand; but she did not speak to anybody, nor did she make the slightest difference in her manner, or show any in her countenance to any individual of any rank, station, or party. I particularly watched her when Melbourne and the Ministers, and the Duke of Wellington and Peel approached her.[8] She went through the whole ceremony, occasionally looking to Melbourne for instruction when she had any doubt what to do, which hardly ever occurred, and with perfect calmness and self-possession, but at the same time with a graceful modesty and propriety particularly interesting and ingratiating. When the business was done she retired as she had entered, and I could see that nobody was in the adjoining room.... Peel likewise said how amazed he was at her manner and behavior, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, her modesty, and at the same time her firmness. She appeared, in fact, to be awed, but not daunted; and afterwards the Duke of Wellington told me the same thing, and added that if she had been his own daughter he could not have desired to see her perform her part better. It was settled that she was to hold a Council at St. James’s this day, and be proclaimed there at ten o’clock: and she expressed a wish to see Lord Albemarle, who went to her and told her he was come to take her orders. She said, ‘I have no orders to give; you know all this so much better than I do that I leave it all to you. I am to be at St. James’s at ten to-morrow, and must beg you to find me a conveyance proper for the occasion.’ Accordingly he went and fetched her in State with a great escort.... At twelve o’clock she held a Council, at which she presided with as much ease as if she had been doing nothing else all her life; and though Lord Lansdowne and my colleague had contrived between them to make some confusion with the Council papers, she was not put out by it. She looked very well, and though so small a stature, and without much pretension to beauty, the gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her, on the whole, a very agreeable appearance, and with her youth inspire an excessive interest in all who approach her, which I can’t help feeling myself. After the Council she received the Archbishops and Bishops, and after them the Judges. They all kissed her hand, but she said nothing to any of them; very different in this from her predecessor, who used to harangue them all, and had a speech ready for everybody.”

Greville then describes the young Queen’s thoughtful consideration for everything that could soothe and cheer the Queen Dowager, and adds:—

“In short, she appears to act with every sort of good taste and good feeling, as well as good sense; and, as far as it has gone, nothing can be more favorable than the impression she has made, and nothing can promise better than her manner and conduct do, though it would be rash to count too confidently upon her judgment and discretion in more weighty matters. No contrast can be greater than that between the personal demeanor of the present and the late Sovereigns at their respective accessions. William IV. was a man who, coming to the throne at the mature age of sixty-five, was so excited by the exaltation that he nearly went mad, and distinguished himself by a thousand extravagances of language and conduct to the alarm or amusement of all who witnessed his strange freaks.... The young Queen, who might well be either dazzled or confounded with the grandeur and novelty of her situation, seems neither the one nor the other, and behaves with a decorum and propriety beyond her years, and with all the sedateness and dignity, the want of which was so conspicuous in her uncle.”

In this vivid personal description by an eye-witness we see in the grave dignity of the young girl the same dutiful child who, at eleven years old, had said, when she learned her future destiny, “There is much splendor, but there is more responsibility,” and, lifting her little hand, added, “I will be good.”

Greville describes the impression made by the young Queen within the Palace upon her Ministers and servants. Miss Martineau, another contemporary, describes the impression produced outside the Palace, on the crowd in the streets who came to witness the ceremony of the proclamation. She refers to the intense joy of whatever was sound and wholesome in the nation, that the ill-doing sons of George III. no longer occupied the throne, and that it was filled instead by a young girl, prudent, virtuous, and conscientious, reared in health, simplicity, and purity. She says even exaggerated hopes were awakened by the change; people seemed to expect that the fact of having a virtuous Sovereign, strong in the energies of youth, was in itself a guarantee that all was to go well: “That the Lords were to work well with the Commons, the people were to be educated, everybody was to have employment and food, all reforms were to be carried through, and she herself would never do anything wrong or make any mistakes.”

Those who represented that it was an injustice to the Queen to expect her to work miracles—

“were thought cold and grudging in their loyalty, and the gust of national joy swept them out of sight. In truth, they themselves felt the danger of being carried adrift from their justice and prudence when they met their Queen face to face at her proclamation. As she stood at the window of St. James’s Palace ... her pale face wet with tears, but calm and simply grave,—her plain black dress and bands of brown hair giving an air of Quaker-like neatness which enhanced the gravity,—it was scarcely possible not to form wild hopes from such an aspect of sedateness—not to forget that, even if imperfection in the Sovereign herself were out of the question, there were limitations in her position which must make her powerless for the redemption of her people, except through a wise choice of advisers, and the incalculable influence of a virtuous example shining abroad from the pinnacle of society.”

The young Queen’s character came out in everything she did. Reference has already been made to her tender consideration towards the Dowager Queen Adelaide. The Queen addressed a letter of condolence to her on her husband’s death, and addressed it to “Her Majesty the Queen.” It was pointed out to her that the correct address would be “Her Majesty the Queen Dowager.” “I am quite aware,” said Queen Victoria, “of Her Majesty’s altered character, but I will not be the first person to remind her of it.” She placed Windsor Castle at the disposal of Queen Adelaide for as long as it suited her health and convenience. But while yielding with the utmost grace on various little matters in which her doing so might serve to soothe and console the Queen Dowager, the young Queen showed a knowledge of her own position and what was due to it in substantial privilege, no less than on points of etiquette, that quite astonished her Ministers. Thus when she went for the first time after her accession to visit the Queen Dowager at Windsor, she told Lord Melbourne that as the flag on the Round Tower was half-mast high, it might be thought necessary to elevate it on her arrival, and she desired Lord Melbourne to send orders beforehand that this should not be done. Melbourne “had never thought of the flag or knew anything about it, but it showed her knowledge of forms, and her attention to trifles.”

The numerous children of the late King resigned into her hands their various appointments, and the pensions that had been allowed them. She accepted these resignations to show her right to do so, and afterwards reappointed them, behaving with the greatest kindness and liberality. Greville speaks over and over again of the remarkable union she presented of womanly sympathy, girlish naïveté, and queenly dignity. He says every one who was about her was warmly attached to her, “but that all feel the impossibility of for a moment losing sight of the respect which they owe her. She never ceases to be a queen, but is always the most charming, cheerful, obliging, unaffected queen in the world.” The tears which she shed at her proclamation were due to the intense emotion awakened by her position; they by no means betokened a morbid or hysterical temperament. The records of the early years of the Queen’s reign constantly speak of her gayety and good spirits. At her coronation, in 1838, she is said to have looked as radiant as a girl on her birthday.

The demise of the Crown necessitated a dissolution of Parliament. A general election took place in August, 1837, in which the Whigs were again returned to power, but by a reduced majority.

Lord Melbourne was again Prime Minister, and continued to act as the Queen’s chief adviser and counsellor, not only in public affairs, but also on every personal matter in which she felt she needed the advice of an experienced man of the world. There were some who regretted the Queen’s extreme reliance on Lord Melbourne, looking upon him as a man of an essentially frivolous and volatile nature; those who held this opinion appear to have misjudged him, but the mistake was one for which Lord Melbourne himself was chiefly responsible. He deliberately put on an affectation of foolish frivolity on many of his appearances in public. He would blow a feather about or toy with a sofa-cushion when he was receiving a solemn deputation, with apparently the express object of producing the impression that he was incapable of giving serious attention to serious things. He had to be found out, detected in earnestness as rogues are detected in dishonesty, by close and careful watching when he believed himself unobserved. Sydney Smith was one of those who unmasked him, and showed that with all his air of being hopelessly idle and trivial, he really was an honest and diligent Minister. In his important position as Prime Minister to the girl-Queen, he showed tact, discretion, and devotion, and won her complete confidence and friendship. Until the Queen’s marriage, he virtually combined the functions of Private Secretary to the Queen with those of Prime Minister. He was much more her intimate friend than a Prime Minister had ever been to a Sovereign before. He saw her every day, dined with her constantly, and sat next her at table, and had the art of explaining all the business of State without boring her with sermons and long speeches. He never treated her, as Mr. Brett has said, as if she were a public meeting. He had first made a very favorable impression upon her on the occasion of the last of the unfortunate disputes which took place between William IV. and the Duchess of Kent. Early in June, 1837, Princess Victoria, having then attained her majority, the King offered to settle £10,000 a year on her. The Duchess wished that £6,000 of this should be for herself, and £4,000 for the Princess. There were the usual unseemly squabbles, and neither would give way. Melbourne conducted the business on the part of the King, and although he must have known that the Princess Victoria would be Queen in a very short time, he yet defended his master’s views and interests with a warmth and tenacity which proved him to be no time-server. It is equally to his credit and to that of the young Queen that this circumstance was the foundation of the full confidence and esteem which she afterwards placed in him. Greville describes their relations as being almost like those of father and daughter. “I have no doubt he is passionately fond of her, as he might be of his daughter if he had one, and the more because he is a man with the capacity for loving, without having anything in the world to love. It is become his province to educate, instruct, and form the most interesting mind and character in the world.... It is a great proof of the discretion and purity of his conduct and behavior that he is admired, respected, and liked by the whole Court.”

If Melbourne was, in the eyes of the world, the Queen’s tutor in statesmanship, there was another behind the scenes no less assiduously devoting himself to her instruction. Shortly before the late King’s death, Peel had expressed a hope that Leopold would not come over immediately on his niece’s accession, as his influence and interference would cause jealousy and heart-burning. Leopold did not come, for the excellent reason that he was there already in the person, alter ego, of the faithful friend and trusted servant, Baron Stockmar. Stockmar, though at one time somewhat doubtful whether Prince Albert would prove the right Consort for the Queen of England, had by this time thoroughly identified himself with the realization of Leopold’s dream of reproducing in Victoria and Albert the loves and hopes and ambitions which had been so cruelly crushed at Claremont in 1817. Charlotte and Leopold were to live again in Victoria and Albert. But in order that the dream should come true, it was necessary that Stockmar and Leopold should have their hand on the “very pulse of the machine,” the hearts and the characters of the two young people themselves. King Leopold had Prince Albert with him in Brussels for ten months, from June, 1836, while Stockmar proceeded to Kensington to be with the Princess immediately she attained her majority, to aid her by his counsel and advice. Her accession, which followed within less than a month, found him still with her; and from henceforth until her happy marriage in 1840 his time was spent with one or other of the young people. To the end of his life he spent much time with them, and remained their intimate friend and most trusted counsellor in all matters, both public and domestic.

Stockmar, besides his share in bringing about the marriage of the Queen with her cousin, had an extremely important political influence on her, in thoroughly grounding her in the principles of constitutional monarchy. Although no Englishman, it was a case of plus royaliste que le Roi. He was more English than the English in his grasp of, and devotion to, our system of government. He wrote to the Prince in 1854: “I love and honor the English Constitution from conviction; ... in my eyes it is the foundation-corner-cope-stone of the entire political civilization of the human race, present and to come.” He was untiring in impressing upon the Queen, and later on the Prince, that the Sovereign belongs, or should belong, to no party. She must be equally loyal to her Ministers, to whatever party they may belong. Her experience at the head of the State will enable her to detect among her statesmen those who have the good of their country sincerely at heart, while differing, as human beings must differ, as to the means by which that good is to be attained. There will be some in all parties who make the honor and welfare of their country their first object, and there are some in all parties who are wishing to dishonor and injure their country, if they think they perceive party advantage to be gained by doing so. To the first of these the Sovereign’s confidence should be given, irrespective of party differences.

Leopold and Stockmar between them formulated the position of a constitutional monarch much more definitely than it had ever been formulated before. Their pupils were the Queen and her husband, towards whose union events were now rapidly tending.

[6] In 1829 the Duke of Cumberland had tried to excite George IV.’s jealousy of the Duke of Wellington by habitually speaking of him to his royal brother as “King Arthur.”

[7] Diaries of a Lady of Quality, by Miss Wynn.

[8] This is evidently in reference to the general belief that the Queen was a strong partisan of the Whig party.

CHAPTER IV.
LOVE AND POLITICS.

The first important political event of the Queen’s reign was the insurrection in Canada, which broke out in the late autumn of 1837. The Queen has herself told us that, notwithstanding all King Leopold’s and Stockmar’s instructions, she was at this time an ardent Whig in her political sympathies; but the history of the Canadian insurrection, while ultimately showing the value of colonial self-government as a safeguard against rebellion, demonstrated the wisdom of their maxims that it was the duty of a constitutional Sovereign to keep aloof from party, and also was one of a series of events which revealed to the Queen the real character of many of the able statesmen of both parties by whom she was surrounded. The first effect of the policy of the Whig Government in Canada was disastrous to them as a Ministry. The Earl of Durham, whom they had appointed High Commissioner, with very large powers to deal with the insurrection, showed a masterly grasp of principles, combined with a total want of judgment in detail. His failure in details was at first all that was apparent; he went far beyond his large legal powers; his ordinances were disallowed by Parliament, and he resigned his office, publishing, before he left his official residence at Quebec, a proclamation attacking the Government which had appointed him. Almost the only group of politicians who supported him at home were the Radicals, who, in or out of Parliament, were influenced by J. S. North.

In the House of Lords the ultra-Liberal Brougham joined with the ultra-Tory Lyndhurst in scathing attacks on Lord Durham and the Government. It was soon evident that Brougham rejoiced in any national calamity in Canada or elsewhere if it afforded him means of damaging the party of which he was a former member. The Duke of Wellington, on the other hand, had a single eye to his country’s welfare. The Canadian insurrection placed her in difficulty and danger; and his first thought was how to get her out of the difficulty, and avert the danger. He entirely sunk all party considerations in national objects, and as even his enemies were obliged to confess, “that man’s first object is to serve his country, with a sword if necessary, or with a pickaxe.” In the first debate in the Lords on Canada, Brougham “delivered a tremendous philippic of three hours. The Duke of Wellington made a very noble speech, just as it befitted him to make at such a moment, and of course it bitterly mortified and provoked the Tories, who would have had him make a party question of it, and thought of nothing but abusing, vilifying, and embarrassing the Government.” On the next occasion, when another party field-day was arranged in the House of Lords, the Duke was expected to make some amends to his party, and explain away the moderation of his former speech; but he made a second speech quite as moderate as the first. Greville’s mother told the Duke how angry his party were with him for what he had said, and his only reply was, “Depend upon it, it was true.” This was the course invariably pursued by the Duke; in times of danger he dropped all party considerations, and thought of nothing but how to serve his country. When the China War broke out in 1840, when the Whigs were in office, he supported the Government in the House of Lords with all the strength he could command. Greville told him that his own party were to the last degree annoyed and provoked by his speech. He replied: “I know that well enough, and I don’t care one damn.... I have not time not to do what is right.”

Peel had shown the same spirit during the general election that followed the Queen’s accession. Certain low Tories of the baser sort had not hesitated to make party capital out of the unpopularity of the New Poor Law, passed by the Whigs in 1834. Peel would have nothing to do with this; for though the Act could not but be unpopular in certain quarters, he was convinced of its necessity, and wholly discountenanced the attacks upon it.

These two incidents in the political warfare of the first months of her reign must have had a considerable influence in forming the young Queen’s judgment on men and parties. Events framed themselves into a sort of new version of the judgment of Solomon, and enabled her to distinguish between the real and false patriots, between those statesmen who really loved their country and acted on conviction, and those who only pretended to love, and acted from self-interest.

A very brief review of the chief political events of 1837-40 will serve to show of what an absorbing nature they must have been to the Queen. The Anti-Corn Law agitation was just beginning to show its great importance; in antagonism with this, and parallel with it, was the more or less revolutionary Chartist movement, associated in these early years of the reign with riots at Birmingham, Manchester, and Newport, Monmouthshire. The country was in a very disturbed state; the Government was weak, and inspired no confidence; moreover, the perennial trouble in Ireland was just then in a more than usually acute stage.

Besides these larger political interests, there were others of a character more personal to the Queen herself, which must for a time have occupied and interested her almost to the exclusion of even more weighty matters. The gorgeous ceremonial of the coronation took place in June, 1838. The cheers of the Londoners in honor of Marshal Soult on that occasion, curiously enough, did something to produce a more friendly feeling between France and England, and paved the way for an alliance between the two countries. There are such a number of graphic accounts by eye-witnesses of the coronation that it is unnecessary here to attempt to reproduce them. As usual, the spectators saw what they brought with them the capacity to see. One gives a detailed account of the pageant, the floods of golden light, illuminating gold and jewels and velvety robes; another sees a young life dedicating itself to the public service. Lord Shaftesbury was one of these latter; the note in his diary on the coronation is: “It has been a wonderful period, ... an idle pageant, forsooth? As idle as the coronation of King Solomon, or the dedication of his temple.”

A purely domestic affair, in 1839, must have caused the Queen much anxiety and trouble. One of the ladies attendant on the Duchess of Kent, Lady Flora Hastings, was accused of being with child; and she was ordered not to appear at Court till she could clear herself of the imputation. Subsequent medical examination proved the entire innocence of the unfortunate lady, who was suffering from a disease of which modern surgical skill has very largely reduced the perils. At that time, however, it was supposed to be beyond all human aid, and the poor lady died within a very few months after the humiliation to which she had been subjected. There was naturally an intensely strong feeling of commiseration for her. No one was to blame exactly in the matter; one can quite understand the determination of those who felt themselves the natural protectors of the young Queen, to guard her Court from the scandals and disgraces of a loose standard of conduct; but it was generally felt that a little more tact, a little more kindness, even supposing the poor lady to have been guilty, would have prevented the report being blazoned all over London and England in the way it was. This scandal very much weakened the Ministry in the estimation of the country, rather unjustly as it seems to us now; for the whole matter was one relating to the Queen’s private establishment, and not to her political advisers. It was a delicate matter which ought to have been dealt with by an experienced woman, possessed of good feeling and good sense. But Lord Melbourne was blamed, and people said, “What is the use of the Prime Minister being domiciled in the Palace, unless he is able to prevent the shame and mortification of such blunders?”

Another of the incidents of 1839 was as much domestic as political. The famous Bedchamber question excited the Houses of Parliament and the country to a degree which it is difficult now to understand. It was one of Life’s little poems that the course which events took in this matter led the Whigs to champion Tory principles, and vice versa. Lord Melbourne’s Government was virtually defeated on his Jamaica Bill, in May, 1839. Lord Melbourne resigned, and advised the Queen to send for the Duke of Wellington. His opinion had been expressed on a former occasion, that he and Peel would not make good Ministers to a Sovereign who was a young girl. “I have no small-talk,” he had said, “and Peel has no manners.” The sturdy old lion had yet to learn that a woman could appreciate something beyond small-talk. When he saw the Queen after Melbourne’s resignation, she told him she was very sorry to lose Lord Melbourne, who had been almost like a father to her since her accession; the Duke was greatly pleased with her frankness, but excused himself from serving her, on the grounds of his age and deafness. He also said that the Prime Minister ought to be leader of the House of Commons, and advised her to send for Peel, which she accordingly did. The want of manners proved more serious than the want of small-talk, for Sir Robert Peel, mainly through a misunderstanding, presently found himself involved in what almost amounted to a personal quarrel with the Queen about the appointment of the ladies of her household. She thought he wanted to dismiss all her old friends, and even her private attendants. She imagined that it might be proposed to deprive her of the services of her former governess, Baroness Lehzen, who had now become one of her secretaries. She felt bound to make a stand against what she considered an encroachment on her independence. The Duke of Wellington and Peel saw her again together, but made no impression on her. If they had explained that Peel only wished to remove the ladies who held the offices that are now recognized as political, the dispute would never have arisen; but as it was there was a deadlock. The Queen wrote to Melbourne: “Do not fear that I was not calm and composed. They wanted to deprive me of my ladies, and I suppose they would deprive me next of my dressers and my housemaids; they wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England!” Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell advised the Queen that she was quite right, and supported her in her determination not to give way; so that the Whigs found themselves defending the principle that the will of the Sovereign is paramount over the advice of her Ministers and public considerations; while the Tories were defending the opposite doctrine. Angry discussions took place in both Houses; Lord Brougham in the House of Lords opening the sluice-gates in a three hours’ speech that Greville calls “a boiling torrent of rage, disdain, and hatred.” The end of it was that Sir Robert Peel declined to undertake to form a Government, and Lord Melbourne was recalled; he had been in a very weak position before; but he was still further weakened by the events that had just taken place.

In after years the Queen, with her accustomed generosity, took the whole blame upon herself. Curiously enough, it was Lord John Russell, who had, in 1839, encouraged the Queen in the line she took on the Bedchamber question, who asked her in 1854, if she had not been advised by some one else in the matter. “She replied with great candor and naïveté, ‘No, it was entirely my own foolishness.’”

These events excited the whole country to an extraordinary degree, and it is not astonishing that they were intensely absorbing to the Queen, and that she therefore, for the time, dismissed from her mind all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, she wrote to her uncle Leopold in July, 1839, stating very strongly her intention to defer her marriage for some years. To Stockmar also the Queen expressed the same intention. These diplomatists do not appear to have argued the matter with Her Majesty; but they thought they knew how to shake her resolution. She had only once seen her cousin Albert, when he had come over to England with his father and his elder brother, Ernest, for a few weeks’ visit to the Duchess of Kent, in 1836. He was then a boy, very stout, as the Queen herself has told us, but amiable, natural, unaffected, and merry. He had now (1839) greatly improved in appearance and developed in character, and Leopold determined on sending him to England again on a second visit to his cousin. After his first visit the Princess, as she then was, had written to her uncle Leopold in a strain which showed that she thought her future marriage with her cousin Albert was a practical certainty; she begged her uncle “to take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection;” and she added she trusted “all would go prosperously and well on this subject, now of so much importance to me.”

The Prince wrote immediately on the Queen’s accession to congratulate his “dearest cousin,” and to remind her that in her hands now lay “the happiness of millions.” But he said nothing of his own happiness; nothing was settled, and the correspondence between the cousins was suffered to drop. The Queen generously blames herself for this. A memorandum made by Her Majesty to “The Early Years of the Prince Consort” is very characteristic. “Nor can the Queen now,” she writes, “think without indignation against herself of her wish to keep the Prince waiting for probably three or four years, at the risk of ruining all his prospects for life, until she might feel inclined to marry! And the Prince has since told her that he came over in 1839 with the intention of telling her that if she could not then make up her mind, she must understand that he could not wait now for a decision, as he had done at a former period when their marriage was first talked about.”

It is probable that no one but the Queen herself thinks she was to blame in the matter. She had seen her cousin only when he was a boy of seventeen, and she a girl of the same age. She had acquiesced in the wish of her closest advisers that she should regard him as her future husband, but she had at the time of her accession no strong personal feeling in the matter. She did not feel then, as she felt afterwards, that the happiness of her whole future life was involved in this union; and absorbed as she must have been in the intense interest of being the centre of the inner circle of politics, and in learning the duties and going through the ceremonials of her new position, it is no wonder that for a time she dismissed all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, the happiness of what she so often called her “blessed marriage” might have been marred had she not waited till her heart spoke.

The Prince Consort’s was a singularly pure and disinterested nature. As a child he possessed a remarkable degree of beauty, and a natural disposition almost without flaw. All the associates of his youth agree in speaking of his perfect moral purity, combined with gayety and courage; but he was not one of those preternaturally perfect children who hardly exist out of books, and even these are generally destined to an early grave. His childish letters and diaries record that he fought with his brother and cried over his lessons like other little boys. When he was only five years old his father and mother separated, and were afterwards divorced. He was henceforth separated entirely from his mother, who died in 1831. Prince Albert resembled his mother in person and mind, and although so early taken from her, he retained through life the strongest feeling of affection for her, and one of his first gifts to the Queen was a little pin which had belonged to his mother. She was beautiful, intelligent, and warm-hearted, and had a great fund of drollery and power of mimicry, which her younger son inherited from her.

Two very affectionate grandmothers, or rather a grandmother and a step-grandmother, did what in them lay to supply the mothering of which the Prince and his elder brother were deprived through the unfortunate difference between their parents. The two children were fortunate in possessing as a tutor a Herr Florschutz, of Coburg, one of those men who have something of the woman’s tenderness for little children. He was often seen playing the part more of a kind nurse than that of a tutor, and carrying the little Albert in his arms.

The greatest care was bestowed upon Prince Albert’s education; his grandmother and his uncle Leopold kept constantly before their eyes and in their hearts the destiny for which they intended him. He pursued his studies of mathematics, jurisprudence, and constitutional government partly under tutors, but also at Brussels under his uncle’s own immediate supervision, and later at the University of Bonn. When it was decided that his education should be carried on in a somewhat wider atmosphere than the little Court of Coburg could afford, Berlin was not selected because it was both “priggish” and “profligate;” Vienna was rejected on account of its peculiar relations towards Germany; the choice fell on Brussels, because he could here study the constitutionalism which would afterwards be such an important factor in his life as husband of the Queen of England. As early as 1836 Stockmar congratulated Leopold that the young Prince was beginning to acquire “something of an English look.”

When Princess Victoria became Queen in 1837, her marriage with her cousin began to form a topic of gossip; and in order to divert attention from it, King Leopold sent Prince Albert and his brother for a prolonged tour over South Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1838 King Leopold had a long conversation with his nephew on the subject of the projected marriage, and found that he looked at the whole question from the “most elevated and honorable point of view.” “If I am not mistaken in him,” wrote the King to Stockmar, “he possesses all the qualities required to fit him for the position which he will occupy in England. His understanding is sound, his apprehension clear and rapid, and his heart is in the right place.” The young Prince said he was quite ready to submit to any delay in the marriage which the Queen might desire, but that he felt that he had a right to demand some definite assurance from her as to her ultimate intentions. He had no fancy to play the ridiculous part so often forced upon Queen Elizabeth’s numerous suitors, of hanging about her for years, having his matrimonial prospects talked of all over Europe, in order at the end to learn that the lady had never had the least intention of marrying him.

It was either to obtain this definite assurance from the Queen herself, or to withdraw entirely from the whole affair, that he came to England, again accompanied by his brother, Prince Ernest, on October 10th, 1839. On the 15th he was the Queen’s betrothed husband. All the Queen’s reasons for desiring the postponement of her marriage with her cousin vanished in his presence; they were overwhelmed by the irresistible feeling inspired by the Prince. In the memorandum by the Queen previously quoted in part, she had stated that no worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections, could be imagined than that of being Queen at eighteen. Very few persons are qualified to express an opinion on the point, but it is quite certain that being Queen at eighteen had neither destroyed Her Majesty’s capacity of loving, nor her power of inspiring love. The letters of the two young lovers to their friends, to announce their engagement, are full of the music of overflowing happiness. They both wrote to Stockmar. The Queen said: “Albert has completely won my heart, and all was settled between us this morning.... I feel certain he will make me very happy. I wish I could say I felt as certain of my making him happy, but I shall do my best.” The Prince’s letter says: “Victoria is so good and kind to me that I am often puzzled to believe that I should be the object of so much affection.... More, or more seriously, I cannot write. I am at this moment too bewildered to do so.

“Das Auge sicht den Himmel offen,
Es schwelgt das Herz in Seligkeit.”[9]

The Queen’s position made it necessary for her to offer herself in marriage to her cousin, not to wait till he sought her love. In her letter to her uncle Leopold, she tells him, “My mind is quite made up. I told Albert this morning of it. The warm affection he showed me on learning this, gave me great pleasure. He seems perfection, and I think I have the prospect of very great happiness before me. I love him MORE than I can say, and shall do everything in my power to render this sacrifice (for such, in my opinion, it is) as small as I can.... The last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I know hardly how to write, but I do feel very happy.... Lord Melbourne, whom I have of course consulted about the whole affair, quite approves my choice, and expresses great satisfaction at this event, which he thinks in every way highly desirable. Lord Melbourne has acted in this business, as he has always done towards me, with the greatest kindness and affection. We also think it better, and Albert quite approves of it, that we should be married very soon after Parliament meets, about the beginning of February.”

King Leopold’s answer applied to himself the words of old Simeon, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” The dearest wish of his heart was as good as accomplished.

The Prince avowed his engagement to his grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, in these words: “The Queen sent for me alone to her room a few days ago, and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart, and would make her intensely happy if I would make the sacrifice of sharing her life with her, for she said she looked on it as a sacrifice; the only thing that troubled her was that she did not think she was worthy of me. The joyous openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me, and I was quite carried away by it. She is really most good and amiable, and I am quite sure Heaven has not given me into evil hands, and that we shall be happy together. Since that moment Victoria does whatever she fancies I should wish or like, and we talk together a great deal about our future life, which she promises me to make as happy as possible.” In these letters one feels that her tone is more generous than his. The Queen’s letters, then in the first blush of love, and always wherever her husband is concerned, breathe the spirit of Elsa’s self-dedication, “Dir geb’ ich Alles, was ich brie!”

She had then, and preserved to the end of their happy life together, unbounded belief in him and pride in him. To her he was the most beautiful, the wisest and best of human beings. He was always to her “my precious Albert,” “my incomparable Albert,” “my beloved Albert, looking so handsome in his uniform.” Sometimes, even in very happy marriages, the King of the fireside has to descend from his throne when the babies arrive; the wife becomes less the wife and more the mother. This was never so in the case of the Queen; her husband was always first and foremost in her heart. She wrote after many years of marriage, during one of the Prince Consort’s short absences from home, “You cannot think how much this costs me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the house and home were gone.” King Leopold had read her rightly, when he wrote immediately after her engagement, that she was one to whom a happy home life was in a special degree indispensable. The cares and anxieties of her political duties made it more necessary for her happiness than even for that of most women, to have her home hallowed by the sympathy, support, advice, and affection of the husband who never ceased to be her lover.

Most women can sympathize with what the Queen must have felt when she had to announce to her Council her intended marriage. This took place on November 23d 1839. There was a large attendance, eighty Councillors being present. Greville describes the scene in his usual graphic manner: “The folding-doors were thrown open, and the Queen came in, attired in a plain morning gown, but wearing a bracelet containing Prince Albert’s picture. She read the declaration in a clear, sonorous, sweet-toned voice, but her hands trembled so excessively that I wonder she was able to read the paper which she held. Lord Lansdowne made a little speech, asking her permission to have the declaration made public. She bowed assent, placed the paper in his hands, and then retired.”[10]

The Queen describes the same scene in her Journal; it will be seen she confirms Greville in every particular. “Precisely at two,” the Queen writes, “I went in; the room was full, but I hardly knew who was there. Lord Melbourne I saw looking kindly at me, with tears in his eyes, but he was not near me. I then read my short declaration. I felt my hands shake, but I did not make one mistake. I felt most happy and thankful when it was over. Lord Lansdowne then rose, and in the name of the Privy Council asked that this most gracious and most welcome communication might be printed. I then left the room, the whole thing not lasting above two or three minutes.” She adds that the Prince’s picture in her bracelet “seemed to give me courage at the Council.” The Prince, with the Queen’s entire approval, determined to take no English title, thinking that bearing his own name would more distinctly mark his individuality and independence. At this time he felt, as he expressed it in one of his family letters, that whatever changes were in store for him, he should always remain “a true German, a true Coburg and Gotha man.” However sincere and natural this feeling may have been, he learned later thoroughly to identify himself with the country of his adoption, and that the true realization of his personality lay in sinking his own individual existence in that of his wife.

[9]

Heaven opens on the ravished eye,
The heart is all entranced in bliss.
Schiller: Song of the Bell.

[10] Greville Memoirs, vol. i., 2d series, p. 247.

CHAPTER V.
ROCKS AHEAD.

The proverbial troubles that mar the course of true love were not realized in the case of the Queen and Prince Consort, at least so far as their personal relations were concerned. But there were some difficulties and annoyances in store for them from outside influences. A foolish attempt was made to circulate the report that the Prince was a Roman Catholic. When the announcement of the Queen’s intended marriage was made to Parliament, it contained no reference to the Prince’s religious faith, and the omission was severely commented on in both Houses. The Queen thought her subjects were as well informed as she was herself upon the history of the House of Coburg, and believed that the attachment of the Prince’s family to the principles of the Reformation was notorious. In the susceptible state of the public mind at that time, and in the light of current events, it was perhaps an error of judgment not to mention the Prince’s Protestantism in the announcement of the marriage. Even when it was demonstrated that the Prince was Protestant to the backbone, the Ministry were soundly accused of suppressing all mention of the fact in order to retain the support of the Irish Roman Catholic members in the House of Commons. The Whig Government was tottering to its fall, and Lady Holland’s witty description of the political situation was that in the coming appeal to the country they had “nothing to rely on but the Queen and Paddy.” Even the Duke of Wellington, who usually kept his head when other people lost theirs, moved and carried an amendment in the House of Lords to insert the word “Protestant” in the address in reply to the Queen’s speech announcing her intended marriage, “thus showing the public,” he said, “that this was still a Protestant State.”

This little outbreak was only a temporary vexation; but there appeared to be serious cause for alarm in another quarter. There was, about 1839, a remarkable outbreak of real disloyalty in the Tory party; it arose partly, no doubt, from the Queen’s known sympathy with the Whigs; but one cannot help suspecting that it was augmented by the elements of social corruption which had flourished in the atmosphere of the two previous reigns. When Prince Albert’s household were being selected, the only conditions which he insisted on were that it should not be formed exclusively of one party, and that it should consist of men of rank, “well educated and of high character.” This limited the range of choice, more perhaps than the young Prince was aware of, and did not increase his popularity among those who were excluded.

A non-gambling, non-drinking, pure-hearted, and clean-living young couple would have against them much that had enjoyed the sunshine of Court favor under the son of George III. The hounds of the “Great Goddess Lubricity” were in full cry against the Court. The undeserved humiliation suffered by poor Lady Flora Hastings gave them an advantage they were not slow to make the most of; it gave them the cover they run best in.

Added to this source of unpopularity which had in it nothing of a party character, there was another of a strictly party nature. The Bedchamber question, the Queen’s dislike of Peel, and her desire to keep Lord Melbourne in office, still further aggravated the situation, and, towards the end of 1839, Tory members of Parliament broke out into speeches containing violent personal attacks upon the Queen. One of these, “Victorippicks,” delivered at a Conservative dinner at Canterbury, Greville describes as “violent and indecent,” “a tissue of folly and impertinence;” it was, however, received by the assembled company with shouts of applause. The chief offender on this occasion, Mr. Bradshaw, was called out by Mr. Horsman, a strong Whig and M.P. for Cockermouth; but matters were made worse, as far as the Tory party were concerned, by the fact that Bradshaw’s second was Colonel Gurwood, the confidential friend and secretary of the Duke of Wellington. Another striking manifestation of Tory disloyalty was given about the same time at Shrewsbury, when at a public dinner the company present refused to drink the health of the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant because he was the husband of one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Duchess of Sutherland, with whom the Queen had refused to part when Sir Robert Peel was endeavoring to form a Government in 1839. Stockmar, Greville, and other observers of the current of English politics marked with alarm the decay of loyalty in the party whose traditional principles led them in an exactly contrary direction.

These fears were augmented by events in the House of Lords and House of Commons, relating to Prince Albert’s position and establishment. In the House of Commons, Lord John Russell proposed on the part of the Government an allowance from Parliament for Prince Albert of £50,000 a year. This was the sum which had been voted for Prince Leopold on his marriage with Princess Charlotte. Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, had enjoyed this income, and the same sum had been voted for a succession of Queens Consort. It seems to have been overlooked that the circumstances of the present case were not quite parallel to these. The Civil List had been readjusted at the beginning of the Queen’s reign, not in the direction of increasing it, but on a scale that was believed not only to be ample, but to allow an ample margin for all contingencies; in Prince Albert’s case no separate establishment would be needed, and only a very moderate household. Moreover, even if no account were taken of the exceptional commercial distress prevailing at the time,[11] the Ministry would have done well to realize that the time had gone by when the passing of huge sums for the Royal Family would go through as a matter of course. But the Government did not take heed of any of these things, nor did they take the precaution of consulting the leaders of opposition as to their view on the matter; on the contrary, Lord John Russell insisted on going on even when he knew he would be beaten, and irritated the Tory party by taunting them with disloyalty. When the vote of £50,000 was proposed, Mr. Hume moved to reduce to £21,000. This was negatived, but an amendment by Colonel Sibthorpe to reduce the vote to £30,000 was supported by Sir Robert Peel and other leading members of the Tory party, and carried by 262 to 158. It was not a strictly party division, for the majority was composed in part of Whigs and Radicals, as well as Tories. Still it was anticipated that the division would set the Prince against the Tory party. This, however, was not the case. His vexation on hearing of the vote was based on the fear that it indicated that his marriage with the Queen was unpopular in England, and when he learned that this was not the case, he did not allow the matter to disturb him in any way, although, as will be seen later, he did not forget it. It will be seen that the fact that Sir Robert Peel had taken a prominent part in reducing the vote did not prejudice the Prince against that statesman. When the time came, eighteen months later, that Peel was called on again to form a Cabinet, he was rather uncomfortable in meeting the Prince. But he found not a single trace of any personal soreness in his demeanor. “On the contrary, his communications were of that frank and cordial character which at once placed the Minister at his ease, and made him feel assured that not only was no grudge entertained, but that he might count henceforward on being treated as a friend.”

The curious in such matters will here note a parallel between the foundation of the Queen’s esteem for Melbourne (page 53) and the Prince’s esteem for Peel.

The Queen was much more seriously annoyed by what took place in the House of Lords on the question of the Prince’s precedence. This is one of the matters in which it is impossible for the masses to understand the classes. It is like the pea and the real princess in Andersen’s tale. Either you feel it or you do not feel it; but if you do not feel it, you are not a real princess. Questions of precedence appear absolutely unimportant to those who are not born with a natural gift for thinking them important. The Duke of Wellington, even though he was an aristocrat by birth, never acquired the power of grasping the enormous importance of precedence and etiquette. When the Earl of Albemarle, who, as Master of the Horse, was extremely sensitive about his right of riding in the Queen’s carriage on State occasions, made himself rather troublesome on the subject, the Duke, who was appealed to, said: “The Queen can make Lord Albemarle sit at the top of the coach, or under the coach, behind the coach, or wherever else Her Majesty pleases.” The Bill for the Prince’s naturalization contained a clause enabling the Queen to give him precedence over all other members of the Royal Family. The King of Hanover furiously raged, together with some of his Royal brothers. Objections were raised in the House of Lords. The Duke of Wellington thought it was unnecessary to settle the Prince’s precedence by law, and that the Queen could settle it by placing the Prince next herself on all occasions. This common-sense view would have been sufficient for ordinary people; but the fact that the House of Lords allowed the precedence clauses of the Naturalization Bill to drop seems to have caused no little trouble and annoyance. The Queen has added a note to the “Life of the Prince Consort,” in which she says: “When I was first married, we had much difficulty on this subject, much bad feeling was shown; several members of the Royal Family showed bad grace in giving precedence to the Prince, and the late King of Hanover positively resisted doing so.” The law of England has provided for the precedence of a Queen Consort, placing her above all other subjects, and giving her rank and dignity next her husband; moreover, relieving her of the legal disabilities of a feme-covert; but the law takes no cognizance of the possible existence of a husband of a Queen Regnant. As far as his legal position was concerned, the Queen’s husband had no rank except what belonged to him as second son of the Duke of Coburg. Greville looked up the authorities, and wrote a pamphlet on the subject, urging that the husband of the Queen ought to have precedence over all other persons. He thought the Tory party had made a serious mistake in the line they had taken in the matter. It was calculated, he said, to accentuate the Queen’s dislike of them as a party, and he also felt that it was ungracious to give the Prince so uncordial a reception. It will render him, he said, “as ironical to them [the Tories] as she is already.” In this prediction events proved him to have been mistaken. Both the Queen and the Prince were hurt at what had taken place, but neither of them was imbittered. He first heard of the cutting down of his annuity in the House of Commons, and the lapsing of the Precedence Clauses in the Lords accidentally on taking up a newspaper at Aix, where he stopped for a few hours on his way to England for his marriage. “We came upon it,” he wrote to the Queen, February 1st, 1840, “in a newspaper at Aix, where we dined. In the House of Lords, too, people have made themselves needlessly disagreeable. All I have time to say is, that, while I possess your love, they cannot make me unhappy.”

The events just narrated received an importance they did not in themselves deserve, from the fact that they showed a weakening and disintegration of the monarchical principle in the party most bound by their professions to maintain it. Revolutionary doctrines were almost everywhere making way; a few years later, in 1848, they shook almost every throne in Europe. Aided by the experience and foresight of their friend and mentor, Baron Stockmar, the young Queen and her husband set themselves definitely, consciously, and earnestly to the task of strengthening the hold of the monarchy by basing it on the affections of the people, and also by making the crown a real power, above all party, seeking only to increase the welfare of the masses of the people, and uphold the power and dignity of the Empire. This object is expressed over and over again in the numerous letters and memoranda which passed between the Prince and Stockmar in anticipation of the marriage, and in the years which immediately succeeded it. The Prince was convinced that the dignity and stability of the throne could only be based on the affection and respect of the nation; to earn that affection and respect, the domestic life of the Sovereign must be pure and blameless; that moreover the Sovereign must be the partisan of no party, but have a single eye to the true welfare of her whole people. We learn incidentally not only that “Melbourne called this ‘nonsense,’”[12] but that he said, “This damned morality is sure to ruin everything.”[13]

But this only illustrates anew that the wisdom of the man of the world is often mere foolishness.

In speaking of the Queen’s childhood, attention was drawn to the peculiarly fortunate circumstances which withdrew her very largely from the influences of Court life and gave her much of the quiet simplicity of a private station. If she was fortunate in her childhood she was still more fortunate in her marriage; not only were she and her husband life-long lovers, but she found in him a character and will as strong as her own; he was a sagacious counsellor, a fearless critic, a far-seeing friend, strengthening her throne by pursuing with her the ends of a worthy ambition. The warning which they both received from the events related in this chapter may have been fortunate too, if they emphasized the resolve they had formed to strengthen the monarchy by making the throne a throne of justice and purity.

[11] In 1840 wheat was 81s. a quarter; wages were low, and trade depressed; the revenue was steadily falling; deficits were chronic; and Chartist riots were common occurrences.

[12] Life of the Prince Consort, vol. i. p. 244.

[13] Memorandum by Stockmar, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii. p. 550.

CHAPTER VI.
THE PRINCE.

The Queen was married to Prince Albert with every possible circumstance of pomp and magnificence on February 10th, 1840, in the chapel of St. James’s Palace. There was a drenching downpour of rain in the morning, so her subjects, although the sun shone later in the day, did not learn the expression “Queen’s weather” as early as 1840. Any doubts the Prince may have entertained as to the popularity of the marriage with the English people were dispelled by the hearty reception he met with from the crowd on his landing at Dover, and afterwards in London. A letter from the Dowager Lady Lyttelton, then a Lady in Waiting, descriptive of the ceremony, says: “The Queen’s look and manner were very pleasing, her eyes much swollen by tears, but great happiness in her countenance; her look of confidence and comfort at the Prince, when they walked away as man and wife, was very pleasing to see.”

Another account mentions a rather pretty incident: as the Prince and his bride were returning in their carriage to Buckingham Palace, he held her hand in his, but in such a way as to leave the wedding-ring visible to the assembled crowd.

The good effects of the Queen’s marriage soon began to make themselves felt. The Duchess of Kent had been, almost immediately after the accession, not without the pang of feeling that her occupation was gone, and that the child to whom she had devoted herself unceasingly for eighteen years was taken from her; the Queen was surrounded by councillors not of her choosing, and was sailing away to regions of thought and activity where she could not follow. Her daughter’s marriage and her son-in-law’s thoughtful kindness did much to soothe these feelings and restore happiness and satisfaction to her heart.

The Prince quickly made a favorable impression upon those with whom he was brought in contact. The most penetrating observer could detect in him no trace of coldness or resentment towards those who had taken an active part in the events detailed in the last chapter. He was particularly courteous to the Duke of Wellington, who was charmed by him, and said he had never seen better manners.

Although he bore the rebuffs referred to with perfect good breeding, he did not forget them. Fourteen years later, after he had been on terms of the closest intimacy and friendship both with the Duke and Peel, he brought up the subject in a letter to Stockmar on the probable causes of an outbreak of hostility against himself, which was very noticeable in 1854. After enumerating the causes of his unpopularity with the Protectionists and the Horse Guards, he adds:—

“Now, however, I come to that important substratum of the people, in which these calumnies were certain to have a great effect. A very considerable portion of the nation had never given itself the trouble to consider what really is the position of the husband of a Queen Regnant. When I first came over here I was met by this want of knowledge and unwillingness to give a thought to the position of this luckless personage. Peel cut down my income, Wellington refused me my rank, the Royal Family cried out against the foreign interloper, the Whigs in office were only inclined to concede to me just as much space as I could stand upon. The Constitution is silent as to the Consort of the Queen, even Blackstone ignores him, and yet there he was, and not to be done without.”

There can be no doubt as to the difficulties of his position: the least indiscretion, the least appearance of the usurpation of an authority he did not legally possess, would have been both exaggerated and bitterly resented. He was emphatically the wife’s husband, a position which, it appears, requires more than an average share of magnanimity for a man to occupy with dignity and ease. His position was one very frequently occupied by a woman, but very rarely by a man. A bishop’s wife, for instance, may be a Mrs. Proudie, and goad the most gentle of human beings into insult and revolt by her arrogant assumption of power; or she may be her husband’s helper and confidential adviser, and his right hand in all his work, making friends and winning over enemies in all directions; to do this needs a good heart, good sense, and tact. These qualities stood the Prince in good stead; he was, moreover, strengthened by the aim which he had ever before him, of establishing the English monarchy on a foundation so firm that the coming storms of revolution would be unable to shake it.

Politically his position was analogous to that of the Queen’s private secretary. Previous Sovereigns had had private secretaries of their own appointment, and the Queen had an absolute right to appoint whom she chose. It was for her happiness and also for the good of the nation that she chose her husband, who was also her bosom friend; no one else could have discharged the duties of the post with so much efficiency.

His firmness, resolution, and self-control would have been remarkable at any age, but they were especially notable in so young a man. It must not be forgotten that at the time of his marriage he was six months under twenty-one. A question arose whether, being under age, he could be sworn to the Privy Council. But boy as he was in years, he showed a firmness of character, a grasp of the principles which should rule his conduct, and a persistence in following them which could not have been excelled at any age. It was a time, perhaps, when age was less afraid of youth than it is at present. Delane became editor of The Times at four-and-twenty. It is only by persistent effort that we can bring ourselves to believe that two generations earlier Pitt was really Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and had declined to be Prime Minister at three-and-twenty, and became Prime Minister at five-and-twenty, and held the post uninterruptedly and with unparalleled power for the next eighteen years. This miracle has been explained by saying that Pitt was phenomenal; his tutor called him “Mr. Pitt” when he was seven—he was born old; he did not acquire caution and judgment, as other people do, with years; he was gifted with them from his cradle. People have sometimes asked themselves whether Prince Albert was not “born old” too. It is true we are told that he had a great fund of drollery in his nature, and a considerable power of mimicry and a turn for drawing caricatures; we also hear of one thoroughly boyish prank which he played in 1839, on the very eve of his engagement—stooping in his travelling carriage when it stopped to change horses in a little village, so that the inhabitants who had assembled to see the Prince, saw nothing but his greyhound, Eôs, looking out of the window. This is exactly what any boy might do; but he was on the eve of a crisis in his life which caused all boyishness to be put away. Just as under the weight of a solemn purpose Hamlet disencumbers himself of all the “trivial fond records” of his youth, that

“My commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter,”

so the Prince, under the immense responsibilities of his position and his sense of the difficulty of discharging them, acquired in one stride, as it were, the qualities which most men arrive at, if they reach them at all, only after years of experience and effort.

Reference has already been made to his convictions upon the necessity of preserving the purity of the young Queen’s Court. This was no effort to himself personally, for he was one of the natures born with a strong preference for whatsoever things are pure. But in the light of the scandals of former reigns, he knew the importance, not only of being free from taint, but of preventing the invention and circulation of scandalous stories relating to himself and his associates. His first request about the gentlemen selected to form his household was that they should be men of good character. He and the Queen always stipulated for this in regard to those household appointments which were part of the political patronage of successive Governments. We hear of this from Greville in his account of the filling of the household appointments in Sir Robert Peel’s Administration of 1841: “As to the men, she,” the Queen, “had said she did not care who they were, provided they were of good character.” A side-light is thrown on the efficacy of this stipulation by an extract from Lord Shaftesbury’s Journal, where we read that Peel pressed a household appointment on the then Lord Ashley, on the express ground that he must fill these places with men of unblemished character. Lord Ashley grimly records that Lord ——, the hero of a recent scandal, who had himself remarked, “Thank God, my character is too bad for a household place,” had received a similar compliment from Peel. Therefore, notwithstanding the express wishes of the Queen and Prince, it is evident that the aim they had set before themselves was by no means easy of accomplishment.

In order, not to protect himself, but to protect the throne from the breath of scandal, the Prince laid down for himself a line of conduct which must have been very irksome through the degree to which it infringed his personal freedom. He never went anywhere alone. He was always accompanied by his equerry. He felt he must not only be irreproachable, but be able to produce witnesses, if necessary, to prove that he was so. Mr. Anson, the Prince’s secretary, says that it was remarked to him in 1842, “by a keen observer of character and by no means a good-natured one” (possibly Greville), “that it was most remarkable that the Prince should have been now nearly two years in his most difficult position, and had never given cause for one word to be said against him in any respect.”

The idle apprentice very often has something to say not altogether to the credit of the industrious apprentice; and men have to be forgiven their good qualities almost as often as their bad. There were not wanting those who were ready to say that the Prince was—if not a milksop—at any rate wanting in manliness; and it is rather amusing to find that he did himself (1843) more good, as far as popularity in society was concerned, by proving himself a bold rider to hounds, in the Leicestershire country, than he had done by years of prudence, caution, and self-effacement.

The difficulties of the Prince’s position were minimized by the generous confidence and unbounded affection with which the Queen regarded him. He at once became, and remained till death parted them, what she herself called her “dearest Life in Life.” She associated him with herself in all State business that was not strictly ceremonial. The courtiers quickly appreciated the significance of the fact that the Queen delighted to honor and elevate him. Her partiality for the Whigs became a thing of the past. She dissociated herself from party predilections. Politically, as well as personally, her husband came first, and it was “staff o’ his conscience” with him that the Sovereign should be loyal to her Ministers to whatever party they might belong. Sir Robert Peel, who became Prime Minister in 1841, formed a very high opinion of the Prince’s strong practical judgment and sagacity, and did much to encourage the active part which he took in all State business. Peel and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, were credited with being Prince Albert’s tutors, in political affairs, and with having first introduced him into public life. They remarked with satisfaction how modestly he exercised his ever-increasing authority, and never gave a decided opinion without first consulting the Queen. By the end of the Peel Administration the Prince’s association with the Queen in all State business had become definitely established. It was a complete partnership; the Ministers always saw the Queen and Prince together, and “both of them always said We—‘We think, or wish, to do so-and-so; what had we better do?’” &c.

This union was equally close domestically and politically. We have already seen that to be parted from her husband, even for a day or two, was a serious trial to the Queen. The Prince went to Liverpool for a couple of days in 1846, and the Queen wrote to Stockmar in her husband’s absence, “I feel very lonely without my dear master; and though I know other people are often separated for a few days, I feel that it could not make me get accustomed to it.... Without him everything loses its interest.... It will always be a terrible pang to me to separate from him, even for a few days, and I pray God never to let me survive him. I glory in his being seen and loved.” The pathos of the words in the light of after events needs no emphasis; but no one who has loved and been loved as she has, should be called unhappy. It was also to Stockmar that the Prince confided his own most sacred feelings upon the priceless treasure his marriage had brought him. Writing to his trusted friend to pour out his grief on the death of his father, the Duke of Coburg, in 1844, the Prince says: “Just such is Victoria to me, who feels and shares my grief, and is the treasure upon which my whole existence rests. The relation in which we stand to one another leaves nothing to desire. It is a union of heart and soul, and is therefore noble, and in it the poor children shall find their cradle, so as to be able one day to insure a like happiness for themselves.”

When Prince Albert’s political influence first began to be felt, he was generally supposed to be a Tory; Greville repeatedly speaks of him as if he were a Tory; but from the wider knowledge which the publication of his correspondence has given, it is clear that his mind was on many subjects far in advance of even the Whig statesmanship of the day; for instance, he was a convinced Free Trader at the time when Melbourne was declaring that the repeal of the Corn Laws was the most insane proposal that had ever entered the human brain. He was ardently in favor of the reform of university education so as to bring the universities more closely into touch with the needs of modern life. He foresaw that German unity was the necessary condition of German greatness,[14] and urged the necessity of the smaller German princes making the sacrifices requisite to the attainment of this great end, which was not achieved till nearly ten years after his own death. The Prince was thoroughly imbued with the sound principle that in politics reform is the best, indeed the only, safeguard against revolution. His mind, politically, was not unlike that of Sir Robert Peel, presenting a combination of Liberal opinions with extreme caution in regard to the time and method of giving effect to them.

His opinions on matters bearing on religion were wholly free from narrowness and bigotry. He presented an example of that deepening, softening, and strengthening of character which modern writers have described as the special fruit of the Reformation among those peoples which have really assimilated its principles.[15] His deeply religious nature was apparent from very early years; in December, 1839, he wrote from Coburg to the Queen that he was about to take the Sacrament, and he adds: “God will not take it amiss, if in that serious act, even at the altar, I think of you; for I will pray to Him for you, and for your soul’s health, and He will not refuse us His blessing.” All through the married life of the Queen and Prince, it was their custom when they received the Sacrament to reserve the day for quietude and privacy. His sympathies in Church matters were decidedly with the party which has since been called “Broad.” His influence was always exercised in support of religious toleration.

In this, as in other matters, the husband and wife were in perfect accord. In later years her most trusted and confidential friend and adviser, among Churchmen, was Dean Stanley; and she fully sympathized with his interpretation of what a National Church ought to be. Highly as the Queen and Prince appreciated the simplicity and dignity of the services of the Church of Scotland, they never professed or practised any approach to Scottish Sabbatarianism. Dr. Wilberforce (afterwards Bishop of Oxford, and later of Winchester) had attracted the notice of the Prince by a powerful anti-slavery speech, and he was appointed one of the Royal Chaplains. Writing from Windsor, after preaching before the Court on Sunday, February 9th, 1845, he notes in his diary, “Chess evening, which I regret, not that my own conscience is offended at it one jot, but that capable of misconstruction.” The views of the Bishop and the Prince became, as time went on, very widely divergent on matters relating to religion and Church government; but earlier in their intercourse they found many subjects in which they were in hearty accord. The Prince’s views on the functions of the Bishops in the House of Lords were set forth at length in a remarkable letter to Dr. Wilberforce, the Dean of Westminster, dated 1845. His opinion was that the Bishops should not take part in purely political questions, but should come forward when questions of humanity were at stake, such as negro emancipation, education, sanitation, recreation, prevention of cruelty to animals, and factory legislation. “As to religious affairs,” the Prince added, “he” (the Bishop) “cannot but take an active part in them; but let that always be the part of a Christian, not a mere Churchman; let him never forget the insufficiency of human knowledge and wisdom, and the impossibility of any man, or even any Church, to say, ‘I am right, I alone am right.’ Let him therefore be meek and liberal, and tolerant to other confessions.... He ought to be a guardian of public morality.... He should likewise boldly admonish the public, even against its predominant feeling, if this be contrary to the purest standard of morality.... In this way the Bishops would become a powerful force in the Lords, and the country would feel that their presence there supplies a great want, and is a great protection to the people.”

A letter like this, accompanied as it was by expressions modestly excusing himself for offering an opinion, is a sufficient revelation of his character, and of his grasp of principles. It was indeed mainly by his character that he was able to exercise the influence he did. Dr. McLeod, in speaking of him after his death, said: “His real strength lay most of all in his character, or in that which resulted from will and deliberate choice, springing out of a nature singularly pure, by God’s grace, from childhood.” It was this which gradually caused him to stand well with both parties, as the singleness of his aims and life became apparent. The feeling manifested against him in both Houses of Parliament before his marriage was changed after closer acquaintance to one of confidence.

When it was known that the Queen was about to give birth to a child, a Bill naming the Prince as Regent, in the event of her death leaving an infant heir, was passed without difficulty, the only dissenting voice being that of the Duke of Sussex, who felt that the dignity of the Royal Family would be best promoted by another arrangement. The Prime Minister assured the Queen that the practical unanimity of Parliament in naming the Prince as Regent was entirely owing to his own character. “Three months ago they would not have done it for him.”

Perhaps the smooth passage of the Regency Bill was promoted by another circumstance. In June, 1840, as the Queen and Prince were driving up Constitution Hill, in a low carriage, Her Majesty was twice fired at by a young miscreant named Oxford; neither shot took effect; the Queen and Prince behaved with admirable courage. She ordered the carriage to drive at once to the Duchess of Kent, in order to anticipate any rumor of the attempt which might otherwise have reached her mother. She then continued her drive in the park, escorted now by an immense crowd on horseback and on foot, who gave the most vociferous expression to their feelings of devotion and loyalty. The Queen behaved then, as always, with perfect courage and self-possession, which naturally increased the mingled feelings of admiration and sympathy for her, and anger for the perpetrator of the outrage. One other thought, however, quickly succeeded these; it was this: If Oxford’s aim had been well directed, and the fair young life laid low before she had given heirs to England, there was nothing between the nation and the succession of the Duke of Cumberland, now King of Hanover, to the throne of England. The knowledge of the escape the country had had, as well as admiration for the beautiful courage of the young wife, caused a great wave of enthusiastic loyalty to herself and her husband, and the practical result of Oxford’s shot was that the Regency Bill passed through both Houses without a dissentient voice, except that of the Duke of Sussex.

It was remarked just now that the Prince’s influence was due mainly to his character; it must not be inferred from this that he was not also an extremely able and accomplished man. As he came into close relations with the Queen’s successive Prime Ministers, they one and all acknowledged the power of his intellect, the extent of his knowledge, and his grasp of principles. Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Derby, and Lord Palmerston, all formed the highest opinion of the Prince’s capacity for statesmanship. With one of them, Lord Palmerston, the Prince was at one time, as is well known, in sharp conflict with regard to his conduct as Foreign Secretary, and this makes his testimony to the Prince’s ability of all the greater value. In 1855, when Palmerston was Prime Minister, one of his political friends, calling on him, expressed a high opinion of the abilities of Napoleon III. Palmerston concurred, but said: “We have a far greater and more extraordinary man nearer home,” referring to the Prince; he then added, “The Prince would not consider it right to have obtained the throne as the Emperor has done; but in regard to the possession of the soundest judgment, the highest intellect, and most exalted qualities of mind, he is far superior to the Emperor.”

The Prince made an equally favorable personal impression on statesmen of the Tory party. When Lord Derby was Prime Minister for ten months in 1852, Lord Malmesbury was Foreign Secretary, and in that capacity was brought much in contact with the Queen and her husband. He wrote of the latter, “I never met a man so remarkable for his variety of information in all subjects, ... with a great fund of humor quand il se déboutonne.”

It was not only in statesmanship that his ability was shown.[16] He was a good musician, and excelled as a performer, especially on the organ; Peel was not long in discovering that the Prince was an enthusiastic admirer of early German art and literature. His interest in the arts and in industry was demonstrated by the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was really his creation. As a country gentleman he had not that absorbing delight in killing animals which then, perhaps, even more than now, was considered essential to his position; he appears never to have become a really good shot, and to have enjoyed deer-stalking and other sport more for the sake of the fine air and exercise they brought him, than with exclusive passion of the real sportsman. As a set-off to this, he took the liveliest interest in agriculture and in stock breeding, and was a frequent visitor at agricultural and cattle shows. He showed considerable skill as a landscape gardener, and the beautiful surroundings of Windsor were still further beautified by him, while the gardens of Buckingham Palace, Osborne, and Balmoral are, to a large extent, in their present form, his creation. In social matters he anticipated a good deal of what has been done in more recent years in the direction of the improvement of workmen’s dwellings, and in his interest in education and sanitary legislation. Early in his career in England he gave special attention to the suppression of duelling, and proposed, as a substitute, the establishment of courts of honor in the army, where charges could be made and evidence heard in cases which had formerly led to a personal encounter. The courts of honor were never established; but the influence of the Prince undoubtedly discouraged the practice of duelling in England. Up to this time, it had been not at all uncommon, even between civilians; and there were few of the leading politicians in either party who had not been “out,” at one time or another, with a political opponent.

The narrative of the succeeding chapters will further illustrate the Prince’s character and his multiform activities. Those who had the opportunity of knowing him intimately never failed to appreciate his really great qualities; but it is only since his death, and the publication of his private letters and memoranda, that the general public have really learned to know him and to understand how he devoted all his powers to the country of his adoption.

[14] In this respect his political views were far in advance of those of his English tutors. Greville records a conversation he had in 1849 with Lord Aberdeen about the Prince’s politics. “Aberdeen spoke much of the Queen and Prince, of course with great praise. He says the Prince’s views were generally sound and wise, with one exception, which was his violent and incorrigible German Unionism” (Greville, vol. vi. p. 305).

[15] Kidd’s Social Evolution, chap. x.; Marshall’s Principles of Economics, vol. i. pp. 34, 35.

[16] In Lady Bloomfield’s Reminiscences, she records a conversation she had with the Prince shortly before his death. “He said his great object through life had been to learn as much as possible, not with a view of doing much himself,—as, he observed, any branch of study or art required a lifetime,—but simply for the sake of appreciating the works of others; for, he added, without any self-consciousness or vanity, ‘No one knows the difficulties of a thing till they have tried to do it themselves; and it was with this idea that I learnt oil-painting, water-color, etching, fresco-painting, chalks, and lithography, and in music I studied the organ, pianoforte, and violin, thorough-bass, and singing’” (vol. ii. p. 110).

CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEEN AND PEEL.

From the time of the Queen’s accession, the power of the Whig Government under Lord Melbourne had been steadily going down. It sank to zero when they resumed office, in 1839, after Peel had failed to form a Government in consequence of the dispute over the Ladies of the Bedchamber. They had been beaten in the Commons and were in a permanent minority in the Lords; and it was said with justice that they were holding on, in office but not in power, simply to please the Queen. It would have been a discreditable position for any Government, but it was particularly damaging to a Whig Government from the fact that their party was specially identified with the principle of ministerial responsibility and a resistance to personal government.

The result of their position was that they were powerless to pass their measures. They knew they had lost the confidence of the country, and that the House of Lords could therefore veto the Government Bills with a light heart. Perhaps this was not altogether painful to Lord Melbourne. The saying by which he is chiefly remembered by the present generation, “Why can’t you let it alone?” is not indicative of the ardent spirit of the reformer. He may have found consolation in the assistance given by the House of Lords to letting things alone.

Given his position and all its difficulties, Melbourne behaved loyally and generously to the Queen and to his successors. He knew the days of his own Government were numbered, and that Peel would succeed him, and he did his best to bring about a more cordial personal feeling between the Queen and Peel and the Tory party. The Queen tells us that to her his word constantly was, “Hold out the olive-branch to them a little;” with Peel, he tried to induce the shy, proud man to put on a little of the courtier and the man of the world. At a Court ball in 1840, “Melbourne went up to Peel and whispered to him with the greatest earnestness, ‘For God’s sake, go and speak to the Queen;’ Peel did not go, but the entreaty and the refusal were both characteristic.”

When the long-anticipated fall of the Melbourne Administration came, and the election of 1841 resulted in the return of the Tories to power with a majority of over 80, Melbourne, who had worked unceasingly to reconcile the Queen to the impending change, did not desist from his good offices with her new Ministers.[17] He could not approach them directly, but he took the opportunity after Peel’s Government had been formed of giving them a few hints, through Greville. He met Greville at a dinner-party and took him on one side and said: “‘Have you any means of speaking to these chaps?’ I said, ‘Yes, I can say anything to them.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think there are one or two things Peel ought to be told, and I wish you would tell him. Don’t let him suffer any appointment he is going to make to be talked about, and don’t let her hear it through anybody but himself; and whenever he does anything, or has anything to propose, let him explain to her clearly his reasons. The Queen is not conceited; she is aware there are many things she cannot understand, and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily, not at length and in detail, but shortly and clearly; neither does she like long audiences, and I never stayed with her a long time. These things he should attend to, and they will make matters go on more smoothly.’” Greville conveyed the message, which was taken in exceedingly good part, and from 1841 onwards till his death the relations between Sir Robert Peel and the Queen were all that could be desired. Her former antipathy was changed into cordial respect and admiration; when he lost his shyness and reserve, and was able to show himself in his real character, she soon appreciated the very fine qualities of the man, far transcending in real worth those of the Minister whom in the beginning of her reign she had so strongly preferred. When Peel’s Ministry had been in office a few months, Greville asked Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, how they were going on with the Queen. He said, “Very well. They sought for no favor, and were better without it. She was very civil, very gracious, and even on two or three little occasions, she had granted favors in a way indicative of good will.” He said that they treated her with profound respect and the greatest attention. He made it a rule to address her as he would a sensible man, laying all matters before her, with the reasons for the advice he tendered, and he thought this was the most legitimate as well as judicious flattery that could be offered to her, and such as must gratify her, and the more because there was no appearance of flattery in it, and nothing but what was right and proper—so right and proper that it is not easy to see where the flattery comes in. The way of explaining business to a sensible woman must be much the same, one would imagine, as the way of explaining it to a sensible man; but this simple view of the facts was by no means perceived intuitively in 1841, but was only arrived at by demonstration from actual experiment. However this may be, when Peel and his colleagues learned their lesson, they learned it thoroughly. In this second series of interviews between the Queen and the leaders of the Tory Party, when a new Ministry was being formed in 1841, all passed off most satisfactorily. Peel said the Queen behaved perfectly to him; he was more than satisfied with her bearing towards him. To the Duke of Wellington she was equally gracious. She reproached him for not taking office himself, and he assured her that his one object was to serve her and the country in every way he could, and that he thought he could do this more effectually by making way for some of the younger men. It is true that there was still some talk about Peel’s shyness making the Queen shy; and Greville has a little hit about Peel, after dinner at Windsor, talking to the Queen in the attitude of a dancing-master giving a lesson, and says that the Queen would like him better if he would keep his legs still; but this gossip probably reflects Greville’s sentiments rather than the Queen’s. Her respect for Peel and attachment to him grew with her growing knowledge of his character and powers. In 1843 the Queen wrote of him to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, as “undoubtedly a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party, and never of himself.” In February, 1846, Lady Canning, who was then in Waiting on the Queen, notes in her journal, “The Queen is very keen about politics, and has an immense admiration for Sir Robert Peel.”

Before the end of his Administration, she not only loyally supported him in the face of his growing unpopularity with his own party, but showered every honor upon him that a Sovereign could bestow upon a Minister. She and the Prince visited him at his house at Drayton. She became godmother to his grandchild, and would have given him the Order of the Garter, but that Peel, with the characteristic pride of humility, intimated his desire that it should not be offered him. He said that if his acceptance of the honor would increase his power of serving the Queen he would not hesitate to accept it; but he could not believe this was the case. Personally, he would prefer not to accept it; he was a man of the people, and the decoration in his case would be misapplied. “His heart was not set upon titles of honor or social distinctions. 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 coveted was that she should say to him, ‘You have been a faithful servant, and have done your duty to your country and to me.’”

When Peel’s Ministry came to an end in 1846, both the Queen and the Prince expressed the hope that his leaving office would not interrupt the cordial relations that had been established between them. His tragic death, from a fall from his horse, in 1850, was bitterly mourned in the Palace. The Queen wrote at the time: “Peel is to be buried to-day. The sorrow and grief at his death are most touching. Every one seems to have lost a personal friend.” The Prince on the same day wrote to the same correspondent: “Sir Robert Peel is to be buried to-day. The feeling in the country is absolutely not to be described. We have lost our truest friend and trustiest counsellor, the throne its most valiant defender, the country its most open-minded and greatest statesman.” The Queen offered a peerage to Lady Peel after her husband’s death, but she declined the honor, acting in accordance with what she knew had been his wishes. The Duke of Wellington, in the tribute he paid to Peel in the House of Lords, spoke with tears streaming down his face; the chief part of his panegyric on his friend and leader was based on his unswerving love of truth. It was this quality, together with his political sagacity, caution, and courage, that had endeared him to the Queen. No Prime Minister has ever had a more remarkable history. The election of 1841 was fought on the Corn Laws, and resulted in the return of Peel with a majority of eighty pledged to Protection. In four years from that time, after a career of brilliant success as a Minister, he repealed the Corn Laws which he had been returned to support, amid the execration of the great bulk of his own party and even that of a considerable number of his former opponents;[18] and yet those who knew him best loved him chiefly for his absolute integrity and love of truth. The explanation lies in the hard logic of facts. Peel and his immediate followers became convinced they were wrong in their protective policy; in ordinary times the only right thing for them to have done would have been to declare their change and its grounds, resign office and appeal to the country. Some of the Peelites, as they were called, took this course, so far as was possible, as private individuals; they declared their change and resigned their seats. Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was one of these.

He had been returned as a Protectionist and became a Free Trader, and therefore, quite rightly, resigned his seat, appealing to his constituents unsuccessfully for re-election. He notes in his diary, “I shall resign my seat and throw up all my beloved projects for which I have sacrificed everything that a public man values, all that I had begun and all that I have designed. Nearly my whole means of doing good will cease with my membership of Parliament.” He refused an offer of £2,000 from the then Whip to enable him to fight his seat, because he would not jeopardize his independence. He was very poor, and he fought and lost. But to lose like that is to win. Why could not Peel have done the same? The answer is: The Irish Famine. Just as the Emperor Nicholas during the Crimean War said that he relied most of all on his Generals January and February, so Peel’s scruples were conquered by the Famine. In Ireland in 1845-6 there were millions of people within measurable distance of death from starvation; the measures of relief could, under the best of circumstances, only be partially successful; they would have been terribly hampered by the continuance, even for another few months, of the import duties on corn. The aim of the Corn Laws was to make bread dear; the pressing necessity of the moment was to make it cheap, and pour in food supplies to starving Ireland. Peel’s feeling may have been, “Better endure the charge of dishonesty rather than add to the fearful total of those who will die of starvation in Kerry and Connemara.” As the alarming accounts from Ireland came pouring in, his first desire was to deal with the matter by opening the ports by an Order in Council (November, 1845). This would have been by far the best course; it would have secured a supply of cheap bread without delay, and the war of words over it in Parliament could have been protracted to any extent without practical mischief; but his Cabinet would not agree to it. Then he resigned office (December, 1845), and left with the Queen a paper, to be given to his successor, stating that he would give every support to the new Minister to effect a settlement of the question of the Corn Laws. The Queen sent for Lord John Russell, who, however, failed to form a Government, because Lord Grey refused to take office if Lord Palmerston were at the Foreign Office, and Lord Palmerston refused to take any other place. Peel was therefore recalled. It was thus through the absolute necessity of the moment that he repealed the Corn Laws which he had been elected to support. In the House of Commons he confessed the error of his former opinions, and maintained the duty and dignity of owning one’s self to have been wrong rather than pretending by casuistical hair-splitting that there had been no change of opinion when there was so striking a change in conduct; he bore with magnanimity the reproaches of those who still shared the error which he had abandoned, and finally appealed to the facts of the situation, the national calamity of impending famine in Ireland; he claimed that as the Government were responsible for the lives of millions of the Queen’s subjects in the sister country, they felt it impossible to take any other course than that of repeal. The great bulk of the Tories accused him of dishonesty, but he took with him the flower of his party, both in regard to intellect and character, while he earned the enthusiastic gratitude and respect of the great bulk of the nation, and of the men led by Cobden and Bright and the Hon. Charles Villiers, who had devoted themselves to the cause of repeal. Their favorable verdict has been confirmed by posterity. Peel’s change was an honest change, and he was forced to give effect to it when he did by the inexorable necessities of famine. He did not make a volte face for the sake of place and power. But notwithstanding all that can be urged in his justification, he shattered his party. The Tories had a majority of eighty in the general election of 1841; they never secured a similar victory till 1874. They had short tenures of office in 1852, and again in 1858-9, and in 1866-8; but on each occasion they had to govern as best they could with a minority in the House of Commons. They were in the wilderness thirty-three years, and never regained the Canaan of politicians, except by the aid of the new electorate called into existence by the Reform Bill of 1867.

When Peel went out of office he requested the Queen, as a personal favor to himself, never to ask him to form a Government again. He was not defeated in his great measure; his majority was ninety-seven in the House of Commons, and forty-seven in the House of Lords. But the day on which the Corn Bill passed its third reading in the Lords, the Ministry were defeated in the Commons on a Protection of Life in Ireland Bill, introduced on account of an outbreak of midnight murders and murderous attacks, such as are now known by the name of “moonlighting.”

For modesty, dignity, simplicity, and sincerity, Peel’s figure stands out conspicuous for greatness among the statesmen of this century. Cobden said of him that he had lost office and saved his country.

His other great achievement was that of reorganizing and simplifying the fiscal arrangements of the country. It was this that first so highly recommended him to the Queen and Prince. They were good economists in their own private affairs, and wished for good order in national revenue and expenditure also. When Peel succeeded Melbourne, huge deficits were of constant occurrence; the revenue was falling, and the expenditure was increasing. Peel evolved order out of this chaos. He inaugurated the era of financial reform. In 1845 import duties were levied on no fewer than 1,142 separate articles. Peel and his pupil and successor, Mr. Gladstone, reduced the number to about five, and Peel was the first to discover the productiveness and utility of the income tax, as a means of raising revenue. The Queen most cordially supported him in his financial reforms, and authorized him to announce in the House of Commons that she did not wish to be exempted from the operation of the income tax. We owe to him more than to any other of the Queen’s Prime Ministers that the national accounts almost invariably show a balance on the right side. Peel was a man of whom it was said that it was necessary to know him intimately to know him at all; and this intimate friendship existed between him and the Queen and her husband from the time he became Prime Minister, in 1841. It was an inestimable advantage for the Royal couple that their political tutor (if one may use the expression) in the early years of the reign was changed from the kindly but frivolous and complaisant Melbourne to the earnest and strenuous Peel, a man gifted beyond most with what Matthew Arnold has called “high seriousness,” a quality without some portion of which no character has any solid foundation. Peel’s Premiership was a national blessing from his political and economical achievements while he held the reins of power; and it was also a blessing from its effect on the Queen’s political education.

[17] This generosity was thoroughly in keeping with his character. After Melbourne’s death, Greville tells how he occupied his room at Brocket, and, “poking about” to see what he could find, came upon several MS. books of the late Prime Minister. In one of these was recorded Melbourne’s settled determination “always to stand by his friend,” and his conviction that it was more necessary to do so “when they were in the wrong than when they were in the right.”

[18] Lord Melbourne, to whom in 1839 Repeal of the Corn Laws had been “the maddest of all mad projects,” and who became a Free Trader, for party purposes, in 1841, spoke of Peel’s change of view at a dinner party at the Palace with vehemence which even the presence of a lady, and that lady his Sovereign, could not restrain. “Ma’am, it’s a damned dishonest act” (Greville, vol. v. p. 359).

CHAPTER VIII.
STOCKMAR.

One of the strongest influences, personal and political, in the Queen’s earlier life was that of Baron Stockmar. This remarkable man attained, simply by dint of character, the position of being one of the chief of the unseen political forces of Europe. Without any official political position, he was the friend and confidant of statesmen and princes, and acquired extraordinary influence by his clearness of view and tenacity of purpose in political concerns, joined with personal honesty and disinterestedness, and also in a remarkable degree with a singularly firm grasp of “the inexhaustibly fruitful truth that moral causes govern the standing and falling of States.”

The formative influences on his character had been the political misfortunes of Germany under the first Napoleon, in the early part of the century. As a youth he witnessed the bitter humiliation of his country, and later the downfall of her oppressor; and from henceforth the bed-rock of his character was the belief in the existence of a moral power ruling over the fate of nations and individuals. His son and biographer narrates an event which influenced Stockmar deeply. During the Napoleonic tyranny in Germany, he formed one of a group of enthusiastic young Germans, some of whom broached the possibility of delivering their country by murdering her oppressor. An old Prussian officer who was present reproached the lads for their folly: “This is the talk,” he said, “of very young people;” and he went on to express his firm confidence that the rule of the French in Germany was in its very nature evanescent, and must come to an end. His counsel was: “Trust in the natural course of events,” and be ready to take advantage of them. Things that are rotten and hollow decay; those that are sound and healthy flourish and grow. Stockmar saw the crumbling to dust within a few years of what then appeared the overwhelming strength of Napoleon, and never forgot the lesson he had learned. All through his life he really believed what most people profess to believe, that the wages of sin is death.

From this standpoint of a belief in moral causes as governing the standing and falling of States, he sought to understand the source of the political humiliation of Germany, and he found it in the petty jealousies and childish narrow-mindedness of the little German States. Once convinced of this, long before the unity of Germany came within the sphere of practical politics he labored earnestly to bring it about. He was not slow to perceive that the arrogance of Napoleon and the shame and despair of Germany brought with them the germ of a better state of things. In the first place, Napoleon reduced the number of small German States from something like three hundred to thirty. This in itself was no small step towards national unity. In the second place, the anguish and humiliation endured in common by the German populations animated them with a common purpose to throw off the yoke of their oppressor. This was a beginning of a new national life. As Stockmar expressed it, “The people had come to know that hitherto they had had no Fatherland; and from that hour they cherished the resolve to have one.”

Stockmar never believed that bad morals could be good politics. It was his creed that wrong-doing brings with it its own inevitable retribution. Immediately after the Coup d’état in December, 1851, he said that out of the elements with which its success had been secured, the devil only could form a stable Government, and that he did not believe in the possibility of a permanent rule for his black majesty. His biographer, writing early in 1870, remarks that it yet remained to be seen whether Stockmar’s prediction would be fulfilled. Within a few months all doubt on the subject was ended by the cannon of Sedan and the downfall of the Second Empire.

A character like Stockmar’s, with a fixed political and wholly impersonal end in view, is never lacking in self-confidence; he never for a moment swerved from his aim, though after 1848 he realized that he would never probably live to see it accomplished. The fact that practical statesmen thought his dream of German unity under the leadership of Prussia a “bee in his bonnet,” did not in the least disturb him. He went on diligently “laying the seed corn,” as he himself described it, in other minds, quietly, almost secretly, knowing that once planted it would grow. After the downfall of the hopes of German unity in 1848, Stockmar was not discouraged, nor would he allow discouragement in others. He used to say, “The Germans are a good people, easy to govern; and the German Princes who do not understand this, do not deserve to rule over such a people. Do not be frightened, for younger ones are quite unable to estimate how great is the progress which the Germans have made towards political unity. I have lived through it, and I know this people. You are marching towards a great future. You will live to see it, not I; but then think of the old man.”

Stockmar’s policy was constantly directed towards:—

1. German unity under the headship of Prussia; and subsidiary to this:—
2. A cordial understanding and alliance between England and Germany;
3. The harmonizing of democracy with the throne through constitutional monarchy.

An apparent accident enabled him to obtain a place in the world of European politics, from which he could work for these ends. Born in 1787, the son of a lawyer in the little German town of Coburg, nothing could have appeared less likely than that Christian Friedrich Stockmar would have any weight in settling the affairs of nations. But having been trained for the medical profession, and having distinguished himself for courage and organizing capacity as an army surgeon, he was appointed physician in the household of Prince Leopold on the occasion of his marriage to Princess Charlotte in 1816. This introduced him to political personages in England. From henceforth we have flashes from the bull’s-eye lantern of Stockmar’s letters on the great world of English politics. Nothing escaped his notice, and he gives a series of vignettes of the Royal circle very different in tone from the formal adulation which often characterized such productions. The Mulatto countenance of the Queen-mother, Queen Charlotte; the hideous face of the Duke of Cumberland, with one eye turned quite out of its place; the quiet kindliness of the Duke of Kent; the erect figure, with black hair simply cut, immense hawk’s nose, tightly compressed lips, strong, massive under-jaw of the Duke of Wellington, with his easy, simple, friendly manners, and his moderation at table, are all noted; so are Castlereagh’s bad French and not very good English; the Grand Duke Nicholas (afterwards the Emperor Nicholas of the Crimean War), “a singularly handsome, attractive young fellow, ... very well mannered, with a decided talent for flirting.... When Countess Lieven played after dinner on the piano he kissed her hand, which struck the English ladies present as peculiar, but decidedly desirable.” Those who are apt to take alarm at the advent of “The New Woman” will perhaps learn with surprise that she is not so very new after all. Mrs. Campbell, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Charlotte, “opposes everything she sees and hears, and meets everything that men can say or do with such persistent contradiction that we can tell beforehand what will be her answers to our questions. This lady, however, professed man-hater though she was, thought with the rest of the women that the Grand Duke Nicholas was charming.” Mrs. Campbell could not cease praising him. “What an amiable creature; he is devilish handsome. He will be the handsomest man in Europe,” &c. Stockmar notes the hoidenish manners, good heart, and strong will of Princess Charlotte. “Handsomer than I expected, with most peculiar manners, ... laughing a great deal, and talking still more.” He was, evidently, rather shocked by her want of decorum, but he noted with satisfaction the simplicity and good taste of her dress. He was devoted to his master, and predicts that the Princess’s impressionable, generous nature will develop and improve under his influence and that of a refined and affectionate home, which the poor child had never known. The Princess herself said to Stockmar: “My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse.” Stockmar was devoted to Leopold, and spoke of him in a private letter as “My glorious master, a manly prince and a princely man.” Leopold, on his side, spoke of Stockmar as “the most valued physician of his soul and body.” In the Royal household at Claremont he was treated by both the Prince and Princess as a friend, and he fulfilled the duties of private secretary as well as physician to his master. His good sense made him decline to act as medical adviser to Princess Charlotte. This office should, he felt, devolve on an English doctor. This may have been either fortunate for himself or unfortunate for the poor Princess,—probably the latter; as there are reasons to believe that he would have prescribed a rational treatment in the place of the purging, bleeding, and general lowering of the system which caused her death within a few hours of the birth of her stillborn son. In that dark hour of the loss of all his hopes of domestic happiness and political ambition, Leopold leant on the firm devotion of Stockmar. He made Stockmar promise never to forsake him. Kneeling at the bed where his young wife lay dead, Leopold said, “I am now quite desolate. Promise me always to stay with me.” He promised. Again later the Prince reminded him of his promise, and asked him if he had considered all that it meant. He renewed the promise; but even in this moment of supreme emotion he was not carried away, for he did not promise unconditionally. “I said I would never leave him as long as I saw that he confided in me and loved me, and that I could be of use to him.” He added, in writing an account of all that had happened to his sister, “I did not hesitate to promise what he may perhaps claim forever, or, perhaps, even next year, may find no longer necessary to him.” Without building too much on his being permanently necessary to the Prince, he knew that he was necessary to him at the moment. No elder brother was ever more tender than Stockmar to Leopold at the time of his bereavement. He never left him, he slept in his room; if the Prince woke in the night Stockmar got up and talked him to sleep again. He watched over him morally and physically, and devised remedies and occupations for him. He encouraged him to stay in England and to devote himself to the study of the English language and literature and constitutional history, and to interest himself in the social and political questions of the day. It is probably a universal experience that love and service go together. One never loves, either human beings or causes, till one has done something for them. Therefore the more Stockmar served Leopold the more he loved him; and the relation between them became almost unique in Royal annals.

He lived with Leopold almost continuously in England till 1831, when his master was chosen King of the Belgians; the limited monarchy of the Belgian Constitution was as much the work of Stockmar as that of the King. Stockmar returned to England as soon as the birth of the Belgian monarchy was safely accomplished, to wind up the affairs consequent on Leopold’s relinquishment of his English annuity; and when this was completed he retired to Coburg, in 1834. Stockmar had strongly advised Leopold on ascending the Belgian throne to give up the £50,000 a year which the House of Commons voted him on his marriage with Princess Charlotte. Leopold consented to do so, charging it, however, with his debts, amounting to £83,000, and with the keeping up of Claremont, the residue to be repaid to the Treasury. Greville’s comment on this arrangement is that the odds were none of it would ever reach the Treasury, and that Leopold would be back before the debts were paid. However, events proved that he had underestimated Leopold’s capacity, and the durability of the Belgian monarchy. In the storms of 1848, the constitutional thrones of England and Belgium, both of them owing much to Stockmar’s political genius, stood firm and strong when nearly every other in Europe was shaken.

In 1834 it was Stockmar’s purpose to retire into private life at Coburg; however, we soon find him engaged in arranging a marriage between Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, a cousin of Prince Albert’s, and the Queen of Portugal; and in May, 1837, he returned to England to furnish help and advice to Princess Victoria immediately upon her attaining her majority. This event took place on May 24th, 1837, and Stockmar arrived at Kensington on the 25th. The King was even then very ill, and it was certain that the Princess would soon become Queen. Stockmar had known her intimately from her birth, and his presence in England was of the greatest use and assistance to her. George IV. and William IV. had both employed private secretaries. Stockmar arranged that no similar appointment should be made by the young Queen, having in mind that when the time came the proper private secretary would be found in the person of the future husband. The duties of private secretary were therefore divided, as had been seen, between himself, Lord Melbourne, and Baroness Lehzen, formerly the Queen’s governess.

Stockmar’s chief work at this time was that of political tutor to the Queen. He drilled her in the principles of constitutional monarchy. In this he was not helped, but was thwarted, by Melbourne, who, as a strong party man, desired to enlist the Sovereign as a partisan of the Whigs. Stockmar’s doctrine ever was that the Sovereign was chief, not of a faction, but of the whole nation; that her moderating influence should be brought to bear on successive party leaders, who from time to time might be tempted to sacrifice national interests to party triumphs; that for “the perfect working of the English constitution, the Sovereign should not only set the example of a pure and dignified life, but should be potential in Cabinet and Council, through a breadth of view, unwarped by the bias, and undistracted by the passions, of party, and also, in the case of a long reign, through the weight of an accumulated knowledge and experience, to which not even the most practised statesmen could lay claim.”

It is needless to say that the eighteen-year-old Queen did not at once appreciate this lofty view of her position and functions. This was reserved for a later period, after she had learned from some of her own mistakes, and when she had associated with her as “permanent Minister,” Stockmar’s other pupil, the Prince to whom, in 1840, she gave her hand in marriage.

We know that Leopold had long ago settled who The Queen’s husband should be; but it is characteristic of Stockmar’s independence that he was at first by no means sure that his master had made the best choice. He had been so much away from Coburg that he did not know Prince Albert intimately. Leopold sent him as travelling companion to the young Prince on his journey to Italy in 1838, but Stockmar still had his doubts of Prince Albert’s strength and energy. He found in him a certain lethargy of mind, and disposition to spare himself both physically and mentally; a tendency to impulsiveness, without the continuous motive-force to carry through what he had conceived. He was startled to find in the future husband of the Queen of England an almost entire want of interest in politics; the Prince, in 1838, wished there was only one newspaper, The Augsburg Times; and he did not even read that! Stockmar also found the Prince lacking in ease and grace of manner. He admitted the Prince’s many good qualities and great intelligence, but wrote, “All this, however, does not yet suffice. He must not only have great capacity, but true ambition and great strength of will.... I will watch him closely, and endeavor to become better acquainted with him. If I find that at all points there is sufficient stability in him, it becomes a matter of duty that the first step taken should be to explain to him all the difficulties of the undertaking.”

It is characteristic of Stockmar that even after he was convinced that he had at first underestimated the Prince, and that it would be impossible to make a better choice of a husband for the Queen, he did not allow politics did not exclude morals; the next step after a suitable education for the Prince was that he should win the affection of the Princess, so that the marriage should be founded on a stable basis of mutual love.

Nothing could be more erroneous than to suppose that Stockmar gained his great influence with the Queen and Prince by judicious flattery. Affection and admiration he had in abundance for both of them; the Prince especially he came to love as a son; but his rule of conduct with them and with all other Royal personages was to speak out fully and frankly what was in his mind, not at all to echo what he thought was in theirs. He did not in this nor in other things act so much by instinct as by settled rule. “If you are consulted by princes to whom you are attached,” he wrote to the Belgian Minister, M. Van de Weyer, “give your opinion truthfully, boldly, and without reserve. Should your opinion not be palatable, do not, to please or conciliate him, deviate for a moment from what you think the truth.” It was this absolute sincerity which gave his advice its weight and value. His early letters to the Prince are characterized by sharp criticism, such as few young men in any position would take in good part; and it is very much to the credit of the Prince that he was able to do so; for instance, on leaving England in 1841, Stockmar wrote a long letter to the Prince, in the course of which he dwells on the tendency he had observed in him to be carried away “by impulses and predilections for men and things which spring from mistaken or perverted feeling. This tendency, which on a close self-scrutiny you will find to be the result either of weakness or vanity, should because of its very origin be most strenuously subdued. The same defect too often leads your Royal Highness, even in matters of moment, to rest satisfied with mere talk, where action is alone appropriate. It is, therefore, not merely unworthy of you, but extremely mischievous.”

Later, in 1847, although his affection for the Prince had grown greatly, and his confidence in his character still more, he calls him sharply to task for regarding the movement in German politics from a too exclusively dynastic standpoint, and also, with imperfect information, for expressing an opinion at all; he tells the Prince that he fails, from lack of knowledge and dynastic prejudice, rightly to grasp and appreciate the actual present condition and wants of the German people; that the current of opinion among thinking people in all classes in Germany was running strongly towards the conviction that the chief impediments to German national life were the dynastic sentiments, the pride and self-seeking of the numerous German princes; he declares that no men are so ignorant as the German princes of what was going on around them, and that their ignorance, arising from class prejudice, blinds them to their own true interests, which really lay in the direction of the development of political liberty among their people. He implores the Prince not to come out with a ready-made plan for the regeneration of the Fatherland, which would only betray his ignorance of the vital facts of the situation, and show him to be out of harmony with the spirit and tendency of the age. Nothing could be more outspoken than the whole of the letter, which covers more than seven pages of the biography of the Prince Consort. It shows Stockmar at his best as political preceptor to the Prince, and the Prince at his best as pupil, accepting the lecture with frankness and humility, and without a trace of resentment.

It appeared from time to time that the Queen was extremely sensitive as to the precedence of the Prince, especially in relation to foreign Sovereigns, and that she desired to confer on her husband the title of King Consort. Stockmar was strongly opposed to this. On a report reaching him in Coburg in 1845, that the matter was about to be broached, he wrote to the Prince: “What can it be which has led to the reopening of that report?... Meanwhile on this head I write a word of warning and entreaty. Never abandon your firm, lofty, powerful, impregnable position in order to run after trifles. You have the substance; stick by it, for the good of your wife and children, and do not suffer yourself to be seduced even by the wishes of affection into bartering substance for show.” It was not till 1857 that effect was given to the wishes of the Queen, and the title of Prince Consort was conferred on her husband by Letters Patent. In the letter from the Prince conveying this news to Stockmar he remarks that for nearly nineteen years he has valued above all others his old friend’s judgment on matters concerning himself, and he had the satisfaction of learning that Stockmar’s objection to a change in his title had been abandoned. Stockmar’s independence of Court forms and ceremonies was illustrated by his habit of slipping away after his numerous and prolonged visits to the Queen and her husband, without telling any one he was going or bidding farewell to his Royal hosts. They would come to his rooms to find him gone. The same disposition was also shown towards the close of his life by his entirely ceasing to reply to the Prince Consort’s constant letters. Stockmar, though not by any means very old, had many of the infirmities of age, and was disinclined to write; therefore he did not write, though the Prince frequently begs quite pathetically for “one little line.”

In the earlier years of the Queen’s married life Stockmar watched her development and that of her husband with eyes partly parental and partly pedagogic. He wrote to Bunsen in 1847:—

“The Prince has made great strides of late.... Place weighty reasons before him, and at once he takes a just and rational view, be the subject what it may.... He will now and then run against a post and bruise his shins, but a man cannot become an experienced soldier without having been in battle and getting a few blows.... His temper is thoroughly free from passion, and he has so keen and sure an eye that he is not likely to lose his way and fall into mistakes. His mind becomes every day more active, and he devotes the greater part of his time to business, without a murmur. The relations between husband and wife are all one could desire. The Queen also improves greatly. She gains daily in judgment and experience. The candor, truthfulness, honesty, and fairness with which she judges of men and things are really delightful, and the impartial self-knowledge with which she speaks of herself is thoroughly charming.”

It was Stockmar’s habit, rarely departed from between 1840 to 1856, to spend the winter months of each year with the Queen and Prince, and the rest of the year with his own family in Coburg. His political activity and interests were vigilantly kept up from his own home, but he compares the outlook on politics in Coburg and London with strong preference for the latter. London, he says, is a high watch-tower, from which he could command the whole of Europe, and Coburg, “a little hole in an old stove.”

He was equally at home in organizing a nursery establishment for the Queen and Prince, in directing the religious and general education of the Royal children, in planning and carrying out extensive reforms in the Royal household, in setting the private financial affairs of the Sovereign on a sound footing, and in far-reaching schemes of political development. He often combined the domestic with the political in a manner that was almost feminine. His chief political object in life was the unity of Germany under the leadership of Prussia, and secondary to this, the development of a good understanding between England and Prussia, and the spread of Constitutional monarchy all over the Continent. It was indirectly to serve all these ends that he strongly advised, on the birth of the Prince of Wales, that the King, Frederick William IV., of Prussia should be invited to England to be godfather to the young heir. The King of Hanover, we learn, was furious at this. But Stockmar hoped that the visit of the King of Prussia would promote friendly personal relations between the two Royal Houses; it is probable that he already had his eye on the little Princess Royal as the future bride of Prince Frederick William of Prussia; he also expected that the King of Prussia would be favorably impressed by the free political institutions of England, and become less averse to their establishment in his own country. Stockmar’s method of recommending Constitutional government to foreign princes was to use every suitable opportunity for having them invited to the English Court, so that the advantages of free institutions might insensibly commend themselves by way of object lessons. Palmerston was also a great admirer of the free institutions of his country; but his way of recommending them to foreign governments was to write despatches from the Foreign Office in London to the English ambassadors in various capitals of Europe, with instructions that these documents were to be communicated to the respective governments to which the ambassadors were accredited, to say how vastly superior the English system of government was to that pursued by the benighted foreigner. To have the same end in view and to pursue it by diametrically opposite methods is an almost certain receipt for personal animosity; and it is not too much to say that Stockmar and Palmerston were actively hostile to each other all through the former’s participation in English political life. Yet Palmerston, along with other English statesmen, cordially acknowledged Stockmar’s absolute honesty and disinterestedness, and also his great political capacity. Palmerston spoke of Stockmar to Bunsen as the only perfectly disinterested character he had ever met with in the political world; and again on another occasion he said Stockmar had one of the best political heads he had ever met with. Stockmar did not return the compliment. He could not forgive Palmerston for pursuing good ends by wrong methods; he accused him of a narrow insularity, of being flippant and obstinate at the same time; one good quality he allowed him,—that he was not a Frenchman. The antagonism between these two opposing forces in the great world of politics had an important bearing on the personal history of the Queen and her husband, which will be the subject of a future chapter.

CHAPTER IX.
THE NURSERY.

The courage of the Queen on the occasion of the attempt by Oxford upon her life was enhanced by the fact that it took place a few months before the birth of her first child. The Queen’s natural courage was perhaps fostered on this and other occasions by her having so much to do and to think of besides her own personal concerns. During the months when she was awaiting the birth of her first child, she was up to the eyes in politics. In 1840 there was a premonitory rumbling of the storm in the East, which has so frequently broken the rest of Europe. France was fractious, and imagined herself slighted by England, and in the summer and autumn of 1840 it looked several times as if the two countries were on the brink of war. The Queen, writing to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, said: “I think our child ought to have, besides its other names, those of Turco-Egypto, as we think of nothing else.” If it were true that home duties and political duties were incompatible, the Royal children would have had a sadly-neglected childhood; but it is a matter of experience that busy people are usually those who find time for everything, and the Queen and her husband were no exception to the rule. There is probably not a mother in England who has given more loving thought and care for her children’s welfare than Her Majesty has done. The children and her love for and pride in them are constantly mentioned in the Queen’s Journals. In the letters from Princess Alice to the Queen, published as a memorial of the former, she repeatedly refers to her happy childhood and her desire to pass on a similar training to her own little flock. Under the date of January 1st, 1865, Princess Alice writes to her mother: “All the morning I was telling Louis” (her husband) “how it used to be at home, and how we all assembled outside your dressing-room door to scream in chorus ‘Prosit Neujahr,’ and to give to you and papa our drawings, writings, &c., the busy occupation of previous weeks.... Dear papa bit his lip so as not to laugh.”

The Princess Royal, now the Empress Frederick of Germany, was born at Buckingham Palace on November 21st, 1840. Prince Albert was then having a course of reading in English law with Mr. Selwyn; the tutor arrived on November 23d to continue his instructions. The Prince said: “I fear I cannot read any law to-day.... But you will like to see the little Princess.” He took the lawyer into the nursery, and, taking the little hand of the infant in his own, said, “The next time we read it must be on the rights and duties of a Princess Royal.” The Queen made an excellent recovery; then, as always, the Prince was her tender guardian and nurse. No one but himself ever lifted her from her bed to the sofa, and he always helped to wheel her on her bed or sofa to the next room. However occupied he was, “he ever came,” writes the Queen, “with a sweet smile on his face.” In short, his care of her was like that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse.

At Christmas this year, Prince Albert naturalized the German custom of Christmas-trees in England; there is probably hardly a child in England who has not appreciated their introduction.

It may be imagined that Stockmar had plenty of good advice to give the young parents. One of his wise saws was, “A man’s education begins with the first day of his life.” He undertook in the early years of the Queen’s marriage the organization of the nursery department. In one of his letters he says: “The nursery gives me more trouble than the government of a kingdom would do.” The Princess Royal was always the child nearest his heart. He had an immensely high opinion of her abilities. “I hold her,” he said, “to be exceptionally gifted, even to the point of genius.”

Curiously enough, Melbourne was also consulted (1842) by the Queen and Prince upon the organization of the nursery, and the choice of a lady to preside over it.

The Princess showed almost from the day of her birth a very remarkable degree of intelligence. Numerous anecdotes are given of her cleverness and droll sayings as a little girl. The refrain of most of the stories about the Royal children is the Princess Royal’s intelligence, and the merry, happy, affectionate disposition of the Prince of Wales. The little Princess was christened on the anniversary of her parents’ marriage, February 10, 1841, and received the names of Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa. Two days after this, the Prince had a narrow escape of a painful death, for, in skating on the lake in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, he broke through the ice into deep water. Fortunately the Queen, who was on the bank, did not lose her presence of mind, but did the right thing for affording the Prince the immediate assistance necessary.

The birth of the Prince of Wales followed very soon after that of the Princess Royal. On Lord Mayor’s Day, November 9, 1841, the Queen gave birth to her eldest son. Greville notes with some impatience that the usual formalities were not observed upon this occasion. “From some crotchet of Prince Albert’s,” he writes, “they put off sending intelligence ... till so late that several of the dignitaries whose duty it was to assist at the birth, arrived after the event had occurred, particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord President of the Council.” The Queen probably thought that this was one of the customs more honored in the breach than in the observance, and in this the majority of her subjects would agree with her. The Queen’s Diary records that on November 21, 1841, the Princess Royal’s first birthday, “Albert brought in dearest little Pussy (the Princess Royal) ... and placed her on my bed, seating himself next her, and she was very dear and good. And as my precious invaluable Albert sat there, and our little love between us, I felt quite moved with happiness and gratitude to God.” At Christmas time in this year the Queen’s entry is: “To think that we have two children now, and one who enjoys the sight” (of the Christmas-trees) “already, is like a dream.” And the Prince, writing to his father on the same occasion, says: “To-day I have two children of my own to give presents to, who, they know not why, are full of happy wonder at the German Christmas-tree and its radiant candles.”

It has been already noted how and why Stockmar urged the selection of the King of Prussia as one of the godfathers of the Prince of Wales, and that the King of Hanover was furious at being passed over. He did not easily forget it when he considered himself slighted, and when the Queen, very magnanimously, invited him to be godfather to Princess Alice in 1843, he vindicated his dignity by arriving too late for the christening. He further endeavored to balance the account between his niece and himself by being rude to her husband. Greville says that one day at Buckingham Palace he proposed to Prince Albert to take a walk with him in the streets. It has already been mentioned why the Prince never went anywhere unattended, and the same reason rendered it undesirable that he should be unaccompanied except by the King of Hanover. He therefore excused himself, saying they would be inconvenienced by the crowd of people. The King replied, “Oh, never mind that. I was still more unpopular than you are now, and I used to walk about the streets with perfect impunity.” This little pleasantry was pointed by the fact that a feeling of antagonism against Prince Albert was growing up in certain sections of the community, which a few years later reached quite serious dimensions.

It may be mentioned here that the Queen has all through her life shown herself remarkably free from feeling implacable resentment even against those whose conduct she has at various times most strongly condemned, or against whom she may have been prejudiced. This characteristic, which will be illustrated later by her relations with Lord Palmerston, Lord Beaconsfield, Louis Philippe, and others, was demonstrated now by her magnanimity to her uncle Ernest, King of Hanover. He had plotted against her; had made things uncomfortable for her mother and herself before her accession; had refused, what she particularly valued, to yield precedence to her husband; had, in a dog-in-the-manger spirit, declined, after he became King of Hanover, to give up apartments in St. James’s Palace which were wanted for the Duchess of Kent; in short, had lost no opportunity of showing himself unfriendly and disagreeable; yet when her third child was born, Princess Alice, on April 25th, 1843, she invited this uncle, who was a personification of the wicked uncle of fairy tales, to be the new baby’s godfather.

In 1844, very soon after the birth of a fourth child, Prince Alfred, now Duke of Coburg, the Queen and Prince paid a visit to Scotland, taking the Princess Royal with them. After this the Royal visits to various parts of the kingdom were rendered doubly interesting to the Queen’s subjects by the presence of one or more of the blooming group of the rapidly growing family of children. The Prince wrote to his stepmother of this visit to Scotland: “Pussy’s cheeks are on the point of bursting, they have grown so red and plump; she is learning Gaelic, but makes wild work with the names of the mountains.”

The Dowager Lady Lyttelton was appointed governess to the Royal children. One of her letters to her own daughter, dated 1844, begins, “Dearest mine daughter, as the Prince of Wales would say.” On the third visit to Scotland, in 1847, the two elder children accompanied their parents. The Queen says, in “Leaves from a Journal in the Highlands,” “the children enjoy everything extremely, and bear the novelty and excitement wonderfully well.” On this occasion the Royal party visited the Duke and Duchess of Argyll at Inverary, and the Queen writes, describing their reception, “Outside stood the Marquis of Lome, just two years old, a dear, white, fat, fair little fellow with reddish hair, but very delicate features, like both his father and mother; he is such a merry, independent child.” This was the Queen’s first sight of her future son-in-law.

On Her Majesty’s first visit to Ireland,[19] in 1849, she took her four eldest children with her (many of us wish she had gone before and gone oftener). She received an intensely enthusiastic welcome. The sight of the Royal squadron entering the magnificent harbor at Kingstown, and the loyalty of the reception of the Queen on landing, made a deep impression. The Times said:—

“It was a sight never to be forgotten,—a sound to be recollected forever. Ladies threw aside the old formula of waving a white pocket-handkerchief, and cheered for their lives, while the men, pressing in so closely as to throng the very edges of the pavilion, waved whatever came first to hand,—hat, stick, wand, or coat,—and rent the air with shouts of joy which never ceased in energy till their Sovereign was out of sight.... The Royal children were objects of universal attention and admiration. ‘Oh, Queen, dear!’ screamed a stout old lady, ‘make one of them Prince Patrick, and all Ireland will die for you.’”

Almost every one has a sovereign remedy for Irish disaffection; but few are so easy of application as this. The Queen adopted the old lady’s suggestion; the child born next after the Irish visit, on the Duke of Wellington’s birthday, May 1st, 1850, was named Arthur after that great Irishman, and Patrick after Ireland’s patron saint; the Irish associations of his name were kept up by his taking the title of Duke of Connaught when he reached man’s estate.

Between the birth of her second and third sons, the Queen had had two more daughters, the Princesses Helena and Louise (now Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and Marchioness of Lorne), born respectively on May 25th, 1846, and March 18th, 1848. The name selected for the elder of these two new daughters had a double significance. She was named Helena, not only after her godmother, the Duchess of Orleans, but also to remind English people of what they sometimes forget, that the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, through whom the Roman Empire was brought over to Christianity, was a British princess, daughter of Coel, King of Camalodaum (now Colchester). Prior to the birth of Princess Louise, the Queen had gone through a time of very serious anxiety in regard to political affairs. The revolutionary movement of 1848 was at its height, and though England passed through it safely, yet no one could know at the time that it would do so, and especially that the Chartist movement would not develop in the direction of revolutionary violence. In the early months of this year the Queen had made ready all the rooms at Windsor to receive the fugitive Royal Family of France, who arrived one after another in so forlorn a condition that Her Majesty had to clothe as well as shelter them. The Prince’s step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, who had been almost a mother to him in his childhood, died just at this time. On every side there appeared trouble and misfortune in both public and private affairs. The Prince wrote on February 29th:—

“What dismal times are these.... Augustus, Clementine, Nemours, and the Duchess of Montpensier, have come to us one by one like people shipwrecked. Victoire, Alexander, the King, the Queen, are still tossing on the waves, or have drifted to other shores.... France is in flames; Belgium is menaced. We have a ministerial, money, and tax crisis; and Victoria is on the point of being confined. My heart is heavy.”

It was in this depression that the courageous heart of the loving woman cheered and sustained that of her husband. As soon as she was able to write after the birth of the new baby, she wrote to her uncle Leopold:—

“From the first I heard all that passed; my only thoughts and talk were politics. But I never was calmer, quieter, or less nervous. Great events make me calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.”

The letter in which the Prince announced to Stockmar the birth of Princess Louise contains an expression which invites criticism; he writes: “I have good news for you to-day. Victoria was safely delivered this morning, and though it be a daughter, still my joy and gratitude are very great,” &c. The Prince is only responsible for the sentiment, not for the italics; but why should it be necessary to write in this way of the birth of a daughter even in the dark backward and abysm of time of 1848? Mr. George Meredith writes of one of his heroines that she had never gone through the various nursery exercises in dissimulation, and “had no appearance of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being a woman.” But here we have an even more perverted sentiment than that presented by a woman apologizing for being a woman; it is black ingratitude for one of the best gifts God gives to man when either father or mother begrudges a welcome to a new baby on account of its sex. The Queen, we gather, did not give little girls a grudging welcome to this world; on the birth of her first granddaughter, the Princess Charlotte of Prussia, in 1860, she wrote of the news that “Vicky had a daughter.” “What joy! Children jumping about—every one delighted.” The Prince, too, on this occasion wrote to the Princess Royal of her little daughter, as “a kindly gift from heaven,” and even says, “Little maidens are much prettier than boys. I advise her to model herself on her Aunt Beatrice.”

The birth of Prince Arthur, in 1850, has been already mentioned. He was a magnificent child, and the Queen took all a mother’s pride in his beauty and his rapid growth. When Lady Canning was in waiting she tells us of many private visits by the Queen to her in her room to talk about politics and to show the beauty of the latest new baby; and of Prince Arthur in particular she wrote on September 1st, 1850: “The children ... are grown very nice and pretty. Prince Arthur is a magnificent child, and the Queen is quite enchanted to find he is bigger than the keeper’s child at Balmoral of the same age, whose measurements she carefully brought back. He has the Royal look I have heard grandmamma talk about, which I think she said was so remarkable in the Queen when a baby.”

The two youngest of the Queen’s nine children, Prince Leopold and Princess Beatrice, were born respectively on 7th April, 1853, and on 14th April, 1857. The Queen’s letter announcing Prince Leopold’s name to her uncle has already been quoted (see p. 24). She said it would recall the days of her childhood to hear “Prince Leopold” again; among his other names the little Prince was given that of Duncan, in “compliment to dear Scotland.” His delicate constitution was a source of anxiety from very early years. He was the only one of the flock of Royal children whose health was not good. It fell to the happy lot of the Princess Beatrice to be the special pet and plaything of her father during the last years of his life, and also, as we all know, to be the companion and solace of her mother in later years when all her other daughters had married and left her. There are numerous instances in the later volumes of the “Prince Consort’s Life” of his delight in his youngest daughter, “the most amusing baby we have had.” He constantly wrote about her droll ways and sayings to his married daughter in Berlin. Thus in July, 1859, he wrote: “The little aunt makes daily strides, and is really too comical. When she tumbles she calls out in bewilderment, ‘She don’t like it, she don’t like it!’ and she came into breakfast a short time ago (with her eyes full of tears) moaning, ‘Baby has been so naughty, poor baby so naughty,’ as one might complain of being ill, or having slept badly,” &c.

In the seventeen years from 1840 to 1857 the Queen had had nine children, all but one of good physical constitution, all without exception of sound mind, and several very markedly above the average in intellectual vigor and capacity. She herself bore the strain of her confinements without any permanent deterioration of her natural vigor. The entry in the “Prince Consort’s Life” in reference to the Queen’s health after the birth of her children usually is, “The Queen made a rapid recovery, and was able within a few days to report her convalescence to her uncle at Brussels,” or, “The Queen’s recovery was unusually rapid.” Attention is drawn to these facts in order to controvert the view put forward by the late Mr. Withers Moore, Sir James Creighton Browne, and others, that intellectual activity on the part of women is to be discouraged because it is supposed to be incompatible with the satisfactory discharge of the functions of maternity. The Queen throughout the whole of her married life down to the present time, when she has considerably passed the proverbial three-score years and ten of the allotted span of man’s existence, has been immersed in political work, often involving decisions of first-rate importance; she has therefore preserved her vigor of mind and power of work unimpaired; and it is not unfair to conclude that old age has come upon her “frosty but kindly,” partly because she never was satisfied to regard her maternal duties on their physical side only. A cow, a dog, or a lioness has the physical functions and passions of maternity developed in all their beauty and perfection; but a human mother has to aim at being all that animals are to their young, and something more; if not, she is apt to get into the trough of the wave of mere animalism, and in this case her children will find, when they lose their babyhood, they lose their mother too. The Queen has always as a mother set the best example to her subjects in this respect. Her motherhood has been no mere craze of baby worship. She has ever kept in view high aims for her children and grandchildren, encouraging them to accept nobly the responsibilities and duties of their position. In one of Princess Alice’s letters to her mother, written in 1870, she replies to a letter from the Queen upon the bringing up of the little family at Darmstadt; the letter is interesting as throwing a light upon the Queen’s own aims in the education of her children. The Princess writes:—

“What you say about the education of our girls I entirely agree with, and I strive to bring them up totally free from pride of their position, which is nothing save what their personal worth can make it. I read it to the governess, thinking how good it would be for her to hear your opinion.... I feel so entirely as you do on the difference of rank, and how all important it is for princes and princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others, save through their own merit; and that they only have the double duty of living for others and being an example good and modest. This I hope my children will grow up to.”

We are not, however, left to infer from the Princess’s letters what were the Queen’s views on the education of her children; the “Prince Consort’s Life” contains several memoranda written by Her Majesty herself on the subject. One of these, written in 1844, says: “The greatest maxim of all is—that the children should be brought up as simply and in as domestic a way as possible; that (not interfering with their lessons) they should be as much as possible with their parents, and learn to place their greatest confidence in them in all things.” The religious training of the children was given, as much as circumstances admitted, by the Queen herself; it was based on endeavoring to implant in the children a loving trust in God as their Father, avoiding all extreme views, and not entering upon the differences of creed. Her Majesty does not approve of the Athanasian Creed forming part of the Church service, and does not suffer it to be read in her chapels. The Queen’s children were not taught to dwell on the supernatural features of the Christian religion, but rather upon the pure and comprehensive morality which it teaches as its essential and indestructible element; they were taught that the conditions of belief in the former may and did vary in various stages of human development, but that the latter was the bed-rock on which the whole structure was founded.

The Queen and Prince, like other parents, took the keenest and most intense delight in the evidence given from time to time that their children had gifts of mind which would have fitted them to excel in whatever position of life they had been placed. Frequent reference will be found in the following pages to their pride in the remarkable intellectual gifts of the Princess Royal, who was described while still a young girl as having “a statesmanlike mind.” Their boys were trained as carefully as if no royal road to distinction lay open to them. On returning from their first visit to their married daughter in Prussia in 1858, the Queen and Prince were met by the “delightful news that Affie” (Prince Alfred, aged 14) “had passed an excellent examination” (into the Navy) “and had received his appointment.” He met his father and mother at the private pier at Portsmouth “in his middle’s jacket, cap, and dirk, half blushing and looking very happy. He is a little pulled down from these three days’ hard examination, which only terminated to-day.... We felt very proud, as it is a particularly hard examination.”

[19] The Queen visited Ireland again in 1853 to open the International Exhibition in Dublin; and a third time in 1861, when the Prince of Wales was going through a course of military training at the Curragh.

CHAPTER X.
HOME LIFE.—OSBORNE AND BALMORAL.

It has already been remarked that the Queen throughout her reign has shown herself a thorough woman in being a good domestic economist. It was quite in accordance with this trait in her character that she and the Prince very early in their married life set themselves the almost Herculean task of the reform of the Royal Household. They found it in thorough disorganization, replete with confusion, discomfort, and extravagance. Various branches of the domestic service in the palaces were under the Heads of Government Departments; no one was responsible for the order and good administration of the whole. To give some idea of the prevailing confusion, Stockmar’s memorandum on the subject may be quoted where he points out that the Lord Chamberlain cleans the inside of the windows, and the Wood and Forests the outside. The degree of light admitted to the palace therefore depended on a good understanding between the two. Again, “The Lord Steward finds the fuel and lays the fire, the Lord Chamberlain lights it.... In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them.” If a pane of glass in the scullery had to be replaced, or a broken lock mended, a requisition had to be signed and counter-signed by no fewer than five different officials before the expenditure was finally sanctioned by the Woods and Forests, or the Lord Steward, as the case might be. Some of the servants were under the Lord Chamberlain, some under the Master of the Horse, some under the Lord Steward; as neither the first nor second of these State officials had any permanent representative in the palace, more than two-thirds of the male and female servants were left without any master or mistress at all. They came and went as they pleased, and sometimes remained absent for hours, or were guilty of various irregularities, and there was no one whose duty it was to control them. There was no one official responsible for the cleanliness, order, and security of the palace; and if the dormitories where the footmen slept, ten and twelve in a room, were turned into scenes of riot and drunkenness, no one could help it. So little watch was kept over the various entrances to the palaces, that there was nothing to prevent people from walking in unobserved, and, as a matter of fact, shortly after the birth of the Princess Royal, a boy did walk into Buckingham Palace in this way, and was accidentally discovered at one o’clock in the morning under a sofa in the room adjoining the Queen’s bedroom. The stupidity, disorganization, and wastefulness of the whole thing were boundless; the only redeeming point was that there appeared to be no corruption. Her Majesty might find it impossible to get her dining-room warmed because of a coolness between the Lord Chamberlain’s and the Lord Steward’s departments; but she was not called upon to pay for fuel she had never received, or for services that had been discontinued since the death of Queen Anne. Some idea of the scale in which the housekeeping at Windsor is conducted may be gathered from the fact that in one year (1842), which does not appear to have been in any way exceptional, as many as 113,000 people dined there, so that there was a magnificent scope either for waste or economy. The reform of the Household was carried out on lines suggested by Stockmar, but in a manner thoroughly congenial with English precedent. The three great State officers between whom the control of the Household was shared, were retained, but their duties were delegated to one official, the Master of the Household, who was always to be resident at Court, and who was made responsible for the good government of the Royal establishments. It is easy to mention in three lines that the thing was done, but its actual accomplishment was by no means easy. A good deal of opposition was encountered from the heads of both political parties, as well as from those more directly interested in the abuses of the old system, and the efforts of the Queen and her husband to introduce internal economy and order into their home were not crowned with success short of three years’ continuous effort, between 1841 and 1844.

The advantages of these reforms in household management could not but commend themselves to so good an economist as Sir Robert Peel. In 1844 the Queen had entertained at Windsor, on a scale of becoming magnificence, the Sovereigns of Russia and France; and Peel had the satisfaction of announcing in the House that the Royal visits had not added one farthing to the burdens on the taxpayer. In former times, during the visit, for instance, of the Allied Sovereigns in 1814, the country had to pay for the entertainment of the Royal guests; but this was now changed, and the Queen provided for her Royal and Imperial guests out of the Civil List.

The little glimpse that has been given of life in a palace, where the head of the house finds her housemaids under the Lord Steward, and her pages under the Master of the Horse, enables us to understand some of the satisfaction which the Queen enjoyed when she became possessed of country homes, one in the Isle of Wight, and the other in Scotland, that were entirely her own. When the purchase of Osborne was just accomplished, the Queen wrote (March 25th, 1845) to her uncle at Brussels, “It sounds so pleasant to have a place of one’s own, quiet and retired, and free from all Woods and Forests and other charming departments, which really are the plague of one’s life.”

The purchase of the estate and the building of the house, costing something like £200,000, were met by the Queen without difficulty out of her income, so greatly had her resources been practically increased by good management and wise economy in the administration of the household. In the same spirit the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of the Prince of Wales, were carefully managed for his benefit, so that a very large property from them awaited him as soon as he attained his majority. The Prince Consort’s love for landscape gardening found ample scope both at Osborne and Balmoral. The work was for several years a constant source of recreation and delight to him. Of Osborne in particular, he felt that he could say that the gardens were his creation; there was hardly a tree in the grounds that had not been placed there by him. Lady Canning wrote from Osborne in 1846, in one of her private letters, “You will be pleased to hear of this rural retreat.... Whatever it is, it perfectly enchants the Queen and Prince, and you never saw anything so happy as they are with the five babies playing round about them.” The Royal children had at Osborne a place that was especially their own, a thing that all children love; thousands of country homes all over England have some Noah’s Ark or Pigs’ Paradise, where the boys and girls are masters of the situation, and may carpenter, paint, cook, and cut their hands and burn their fingers without let or hindrance from nurses or governesses. The Royal children at Osborne had their Swiss Cottage. Here the boys had a forge and a carpenter’s bench, or learnt the art of war by making fortifications, and the girls had little gardens and kitchens and rooms for their special games and pastimes; there was also a Natural History museum which was a source of much interest and delight.

There is another feature of the gardens at Osborne which should be mentioned, an immense myrtle-tree which was struck from a sprig of myrtle from the wedding bouquet of the Princess Royal; every Royal bride in the Queen’s family carries a piece of this myrtle with her to the altar on her marriage-day. The Queen has twice sent sprays of this myrtle as far as St. Petersburg, once in 1874, for the bridal bouquet of her daughter-in-law, the Archduchess Marie, now Duchess of Coburg, and once in 1894, for the bouquet of her granddaughter, the Princess Alix of Hesse, now the wife of the Czar of Russia. On the former occasion the myrtle was intrusted to the care of Lady Augusta Stanley, and the Queen gave her special instructions how to revive it in tepid water.

Osborne was a harbor of refuge to which the Queen and Prince could run for a few days’ rest at any time when they felt their strength almost exhausted from the constant pressure of political work and responsibility; but they had an even more dearly loved holiday resort in their home in the Highlands at Balmoral. The Prince was always extremely sensitive to good air, and the smoky atmosphere of towns was peculiarly oppressive to him; he used to exclaim on reaching the pure country air, “Now I can breathe! Now I am happy!” The fine air of Dee-side was life and breath to him. In addition to the benefit to their health, the Royal couple delighted in Scotland for other reasons, the chief of which was that they could enjoy there a degree of freedom to which they were strangers elsewhere. Highland loyalty is compatible with perfectly good manners, and the poor people round Balmoral did not demonstrate their affection for their Sovereign by staring at her as if she were a waxwork show, or dogging her carriage or her footsteps whenever she went beyond her own gates. The Highland servants combined perfect respect with independence of character. The Queen delighted in them, and found real friends in several of them. The Royal family could make little incognito expeditions in Scotland, and stay at small country inns as Lord and Lady Churchill and party, without any danger of being found out; or if they were found out, the people who made the discovery were too well bred to proclaim it, and showed their loyalty by respecting the wishes of their Sovereign to enjoy privacy. In the years before the Prince Consort’s death the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, writing from Scotland, frequently speak of Her Majesty’s high spirits, her love of dancing, and her enjoyment of rapid driving.

Lady Canning wrote in the autumn of 1848 from Balmoral:—

“The Queen has been up a really high mountain to-day, and has come down quite fresh after many hours.... The Queen is more and more delighted with Balmoral. She makes long expeditions alone with the Prince and gamekeepers, and has never been so independent before.... She went up Loch-na-gar, ... and the same evening entertained all the neighbors at dinner, and was as fresh and merry as if she had done nothing.”

Four years later, Lady Canning wrote again from Balmoral:—

“The Queen is fonder than ever of this place, and the Prince’s shooting improves. The children are as merry as grigs, and I hear the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred, who live under me, singing away out of lesson-time as loud as ever they can.”

Greville gives a description of the Royal Family at Balmoral, which deserves notice, especially as he had seen so much of Kings and Queens, and had no great affection for them; he was summoned to Balmoral for a Council meeting in 1849, before the present house, which is on a larger scale than the old one, was built; he writes:—

“Much as I dislike Courts and all that appertains to them, I am glad to have made this expedition, and to have seen the Queen and Prince in their Highland retreat, where they certainly appear to great advantage. The place is very pretty, the house very small. They live not merely like private gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks,—small house, small rooms, small establishment.[20] There are no soldiers.... They live with the greatest simplicity and ease. The Prince shoots every morning, returns to luncheon, and then they walk and drive. The Queen is running in and out of the house all day long, and often goes about alone, walks into the cottages, and sits down and chats with the old women. I never before was in the society of the Prince, or had any conversation with him.... I was greatly struck with him. I saw at once (what I had always heard) that he is very intelligent and highly cultivated, and, moreover, that he has a thoughtful mind, and thinks of subjects worth thinking about. He seemed very much at his ease, very gay, pleasant, and without the least stiffness or air of dignity.”

He then mentions an excursion in the afternoon in two pony carriages to the Highland gathering at Braemar, and that the evening wound up with a visit from a Highland dancing-master, who gave all the party, except himself and Lord John Russell, lessons in reels.

The Queen’s half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, had been their companion on one of the very early visits of the Royal Family to Scotland. He died in 1856, and this loss was the first heart grief that the Queen had been called upon to endure. She was very tenderly attached to her half-brother and sister. The letters from the latter[21] in the “Prince Consort’s Life” indicate that hers was a noble soul, one of those beautiful natures, strong in love and spiritual insight, who, whether born in the palace or the cottage, are as a sheet-anchor to those who are baffled by the waves of sorrow and suffering.

A rather curious incident in the Queen’s private life may here be mentioned. A perfect stranger to her, Mr. Neale, died in 1852, and left her a legacy of £200,000. Her Majesty, on hearing of this, at once declared that if he had any relatives she would not accept the money; but it appeared that he had none.

The various attacks that have been made on the Queen’s life belong more, perhaps, to her private than to her public life, for they have been the work of half-witted scoundrels rather than of political desperadoes. In Ireland, when a murder is neither political nor agrarian, it is sometimes described as “merely a friendly affair;” and there is an undoubted satisfaction in the fact that the shots fired at the Queen have had no political aim. The first attempt on her life has been already recorded. On the second occasion the Queen again displayed a very remarkable degree of courage, because she drove out alone with the Prince when she knew that very probably she would be the aim of an assassin’s bullet. It was in 1842, on Sunday, May 29, the Queen and Prince were returning from the Chapel Royal, St. James’s, in a carriage along the Mall, when the Prince distinctly saw a man step out from the crowd, present a pistol full at them, and pull the trigger. He was only two paces distant, and the Prince heard the trigger snap, so there was no mistake about it. Fortunately, the weapon missed fire, and at first the Prince thought that no one but himself had seen what had happened. However, the attempt had been seen by two persons in the crowd, a boy and an old gentleman; the old gentleman did nothing, but the boy came the next day, and reported what he had seen at the Palace. The Home Office and the police were communicated with, and there was naturally a good deal of excitement on the part of the Queen and Prince. They at once determined not to shut themselves up, but to take their drive as usual, although they knew that the would-be assassin was at large. The only difference they made in her usual habits was that they went alone, without either a Lady-in-Waiting or a Maid of Honor in the carriage. They took the precaution of giving orders to drive faster than usual, and the Queen always drove fast, and two equerries on horseback accompanied the carriage. Nearly at the end of their drive, between the Green Park and the garden wall of Buckingham Palace, they were shot at again by the same man who had made the attempt the day before. When he fired he was only about five paces off. The shot, the Prince wrote, must have passed under the carriage. The fellow (John Francis) was immediately seized. He was not crazy, but just a thorough scamp, “a little swarthy, ill-looking rascal.” The same evening at dinner the Queen turned to one of her Maids of Honor, who had been rather put out at not being required to attend the Queen on her drive, and said, “I dare say, Georgy, you were surprised at not driving with me this afternoon, but the fact was that as we returned from church yesterday a man presented a pistol at the carriage window, which flashed in the pan, and we were so taken by surprise he had time to escape, so I knew what was hanging over me, and was determined to expose no life but my own.” The Queen’s uncle, Count Mensdorff, was very proud of his niece’s courage, and called her sehr müthig, which pleased her very much, coming, as the compliment did, from a soldier who had seen much service. Greville’s comment on the Queen’s conduct is: “Very brave, but very imprudent.” A couple of months later, in July, 1842, another of these dastardly attempts was made on Her Majesty’s life, this time by a hunchback named Bean. Oxford had been treated as a lunatic, and sent to an asylum; Francis had been found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death; but, at the Queen’s strongly expressed wish, the sentence had been commuted to transportation for life. This leniency had been made public only the day before Bean’s attempt, and the circumstance strengthened Her Majesty’s conviction that an alteration in the law was desirable. Up to this time it was only possible to deal with these outrages either as lunacy or as high treason, for which the penalty was death. After Bean’s attempt a Bill was immediately introduced, and carried, making such offences punishable, as misdemeanors, by transportation, imprisonment, or whipping. The substitution of an unromantic, but certain, punishment, for a dignified, but uncertain one, had the desired effect, and these scoundrelly attacks upon the Queen ceased to be fashionable in the criminal world. Feints at attempted assassination were made in 1849 by an Irish bricklayer, and in 1872 by a lad named O’Connor, who appears to have been a Fenian; but the weapons used by these worthies were not charged except with powder. In 1882 a man named Maclean fired at the Queen as she was entering her carriage at Windsor Station. He was found on trial to be insane. In June, 1850, she was struck on the face with a cane by a man named Pate, who had been a lieutenant in the army. The Prince Consort said this man was “manifestly deranged.” The chivalrous nature of Peel was strongly moved by the attacks of Francis and Bean, which took place while he was Prime Minister. After Bean’s attempt he hurried up to town to see the Prince, and consult with him on what ought to be done. While he was in conversation with the Prince the Queen entered the room, and Peel’s emotion was so great that his habitual self-control left him, and he burst into tears. When it is remembered that only a few months earlier Greville had said, “Peel is so shy he makes the Queen shy,” it is impossible not to surmise that this touch of nature may have brought about the final breaking down of reserve and coldness between the Queen and her Prime Minister.

In various memoirs of the time, little pictures are given of “the Queen at Sea.” She is a good sailor, and thoroughly enjoys the element over which Britannia rules. She likes sailors, and understands them. Greville tells that nothing could be more easy and agreeable than her demeanor on board her Royal yacht, “conversing all the time with perfect ease and good humor, and on all subjects, taking great interest, and very curious about everything in the ship, dining on deck in the midst of the sailors, making them dance, talking to the boatswain, and, in short, doing everything that was popular and ingratiating.” He complains, however, that she was impatient, and always wanted to be going ahead, and to do everything quickly; whereas the genuine sailor has an unfathomable capacity for loafing. Lady Bloomfield, when Miss Georgina Liddell, attended the Queen as one of her Maids of Honor on a yachting cruise in 1843. She narrates how the Queen and her ladies settled themselves for reading and work in a very comfortable and sheltered place on deck, when they became aware that the position they had taken up was the subject of something like consternation to the captain and crew. The Queen laughingly inquired if there was about to be a mutiny? The captain in the same spirit replied that he could be answerable for nothing unless Her Majesty would be graciously pleased to change her seat. The chairs of the ladies were blockading the grog cupboard! As soon as the Queen was informed of this, she consented to move her chair, on condition that she was to share the sailors’ grog. On tasting it she said, “I am afraid I can only make the same remark I did once before, that I think it would be very good if it were stronger!” The hint was taken, and the sailors were of course delighted by the Queen’s good-nature.

One more little home touch must conclude this chapter. Reference has already been made to the Queen’s reluctance to part from the Prince even for a few days. When it was necessary for him to leave her, he kept her constantly supplied with diary-letters, showing that his thoughts and heart were ever with her. On one of these absences, occasioned by the death of his father, the Duke of Coburg, in 1844, Prince Albert was away a fortnight. His own entry in his journal thus records his return: “Crossed on the 11th. I arrived at six o’clock in the evening at Windsor. Great joy.”

[20] The new house at Balmoral was not finished till 1855.

[21] The Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe.

CHAPTER XI.
FORTY-THREE TO FORTY-EIGHT.

The Queen’s first visit to a foreign country took place in September, 1843, when she and the Prince visited Louis Philippe and his family at Château d’Eu, near Tréport. It was not only the Queen’s first visit to France, but the first time since the Field of the Cloth of Gold that an English reigning sovereign had been in France; and even then the meeting of the two sovereigns had taken place on English territory near Calais. The Queen was enchanted with everything she saw. She had to the full all the keen and vivid interest which is almost invariably awakened by seeing for the first time all those innumerable little differences in every-day things which make a first foreign visit such a revelation. If she was delighted with France, she was no less so with her hosts, the King of the French and his family. She had been for six years Queen of England, and it was, perhaps, a refreshment to her to associate with those who were not her subjects, but her equals. She wrote in her journal, “I feel so gay and happy with these dear people.” Louis Philippe, on his part, was extremely anxious to make her visit agreeable to her. He highly appreciated the honor she was conferring on him. The representatives of the ancient monarchies of Europe did not view him with any cordiality. He was not king by divine right, but by the choice of the French people; the rightful King of France, in the view of the Emperors of Russia and Austria, was the exiled Comte de Chambord, Henry V. as they called him. Hence Louis Philippe cordially welcomed the social prestige which he gained by receiving a visit from the Queen of England. The King expressed his obligations on this score to Prince Albert over and over again.

The Earl of Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary of the day, accompanied the Queen and Prince to France. The English Foreign Office at this time regarded with apprehension a scheme which they believed Louis Philippe and his Minister, Guizot, had in view of strengthening French interests in Spain by marrying one of the King’s sons to the young Queen Isabella. Louis Philippe, on the occasion of the Queen’s visit, assured her most positively, and Guizot said the same thing to Aberdeen, that he had no wish or intention of the kind, that even if his son were asked in marriage for the Queen of Spain, he would not consent. The Queen of Spain and her sister the Infanta were then young girls of thirteen and twelve respectively. The French King’s assurances to our Queen went so far as a positive promise that even if one of his sons should eventually marry the Infanta, he should not consent to the union until after the Queen of Spain was married and had children. It is necessary to go at length into the wretched story. Louis Philippe and Guizot covered themselves with infamy. Through their influence a hateful marriage was forced on Queen Isabella, her consent to it being, it is said, wrung from her under the influence of intoxication; from this marriage it was hoped and believed that no children would be born. At the same time that this so-called marriage was announced, it was also made public that the Infanta would be married to the Duc de Montpensier, son of Louis Philippe. The two marriages took place on the same day, October 10th, 1846. Well might Stockmar write of this odious transaction, as “a political intrigue which exceeds in immorality and vulgarity everything brought out in modern times on the theatre of politics; a part which would have shut out any one who had attempted to play it in the circle of private life from all respectable society.”

Our Queen was deeply incensed; her whole soul revolted from the wickedness of the scheme, and she had the added bitterness of feeling that Louis Philippe had been guilty of personal deception towards herself. It was he who introduced the subject when she visited him at Eu, and gave her assurances upon it, unsought by her, and lightly broken by him. His way of announcing the project to her did not mend matters. He was ashamed to broach the subject in a formal manner, and he got his wife to tell the Queen as a detail of family news in a private and friendly letter, speaking of it as if it were of no political importance, but simply an event that would add to the domestic happiness (“le seul vrai dans ce monde,” the poor Queen Marie Amélie was made to say) of the French Royal Family. Our Queen’s reply was exceeding dignified, severe, short, and self-restrained. It left no doubt as to her sentiments; and nothing is more indicative of Louis Philippe’s bad conscience in the matter than the fact, which he himself admits, that he sat up till four in the morning on three following nights composing a reply in which he endeavored in vain to justify himself.[22]

It is of course quite open to doubt whether the English Foreign Office had been justified in regarding with apprehension the possible accession of a grandson of Louis Philippe to the troublous royalty of Spain. Cobden and the school he represented in England did not think it mattered a straw to England, from the political point of view, whom the Queen of Spain married. But the transaction could not be looked at as merely political. It was condemned throughout the length and breadth of England as grossly immoral, and the disgust it occasioned was all the greater on account of the pretensions to high motives and to religious principles assumed by the French King and his Minister.

Events soon confirmed the views of the Queen and Prince, so often inculcated by Stockmar, that sorrow will always be found dogging sin. The Spanish marriages took place in October, 1846: in fifteen months from that time Louis Philippe and the dynasty he hoped to found had been swept away; the little Spanish daughter-in-law whose son he had hoped might wear the crown of Spain was, with other members of his family, fugitive in England, indebted for shelter and even clothing to our Queen, who forgot all her resentment, and gave them a most kind welcome. Nothing came about as Louis Philippe had planned. The Queen of Spain had children; her grandson is now the baby King of Spain, and Louis Philippe’s great-grandson, exiled from France, is addressing futile[23] proclamations from English soil, to assure the French people that when they want him, which they show no sign of doing, he is ready to ascend the throne of his ancestors. It has been remarked that a strange fatality attended on many of the chief actors in the Spanish marriages. The French Minister at Madrid, M. Bresson, committed suicide in 1847. Louis Philippe and his dynasty were overthrown in 1848. Queen Isabella was deposed in 1868. Her son, Alfonso XII., married his cousin Princess Mercedes Montpensier. She died, not without suspicions of poisoning, within a year of her marriage; and he died, while still quite a young man, before the birth of his only son by his second marriage. Before the accession of Alfonso XII., the question of a successor to Queen Isabella was the proximate cause of the French and German War of 1870-71.

Cobden, travelling in France very shortly before the outbreak of 1848, saw nothing which led him to expect any political disturbance; he believed the future to promise nothing but tranquillity and commercial development, and that Free Trade spelt “peace on earth.”

Stockmar was a Free Trader too, but he had learnt that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. He did not look for spiritual results from purely material causes; and perhaps his vantage-ground on what he called the watch-tower of London, or even his position at the “hole in the stove” in Coburg, enabled him to gauge more correctly than Cobden the political forces of the time. He had foreseen the outbreak of revolution, as the result to be expected from despotism and bad government on the Continent, added to the misery and destitution of the great masses of the people. The storm of 1848 did not find him unprepared; and in England and Belgium, where the principles of constitutionalism, as understood and taught by him, had taken firm hold, were almost the only countries in Europe where revolution did not get the upper hand.

But although this was so, 1848 was a sufficiently serious time in England. In Ireland the misery of the people had amounted to actual famine, and notwithstanding everything that lavish expenditure and devoted services, both by public servants and private individuals, could do, hundreds of thousands perished from starvation or its attendant pestilence. In the Union of Skibbereen nearly the whole population, 11,000 persons, perished. The shopkeepers of the little Kerry town of Kenmare told the writer of these pages in 1870 that during the worst months of the famine of 1847 they seldom took down their shutters in the morning without finding one or two corpses in the street, poor things who had been living in the mountains and had just had strength to crawl down into Kenmare to die. And what was famine in Ireland was the bitter pinch of scarcity in England and Scotland. In February, 1847, wheat was 102 shillings a quarter; added to this there was a general sense of alarm and absence of security, bringing with it want of capital, want of employment, want of wages. There was hardly a house, rich or poor, that was not suffering loss; but while to the rich the loss meant giving up luxuries which only custom had made seem necessaries, to the poor it meant actual want and privation;[24] when men are low and miserable, and feel they have nothing to lose, is the time when revolutionary propaganda works like wildfire among them. There was an avowedly revolutionary political party in Ireland, always ready to take advantage of any difficulty the Government might be in, foreign or domestic, in order to harass and thwart them. “Refuse us this” (repeal of the Union) O’Connell had said in 1840, when war with France hung in the balance about the Eastern Question, “and then in the day of your weakness dare to go to war with the most insignificant of the powers of Europe.” In 1848, the mantle of O’Connell had fallen on John Mitchel, who, in his paper called The United Irishman, gave instructions for the successful carrying on of revolutionary street warfare; he recommended the covering of the streets with broken glass to lame the horses of the soldiery, and suggested that the citizens should provide themselves with missiles to throw from the houses; these, he said, could be used with great effect from the elevation of a top story, especially if forethought had been used to provide “boiling water or grease, or, better, cold vitriol if available. Molten lead is good, but too valuable; it should always be cast in bullets and allowed to cool.” This and a great deal of similar rubbish was poured forth day by day, or week by week, in the rebel papers. It would be harmless enough in an ordinary way; but amid the excitements of 1848, and addressed to such an excitable people, it might have proved a spark in a powder magazine. Mr. Mitchel proclaimed his intention of committing high treason, but he was arrested before he had had an opportunity of doing so. A deputation of Irish revolutionists was sent to the Provisional Government in Paris to demand “what they were sure to obtain, the assistance of 50,000 troops for Ireland.” The French Government absolutely declined the proposal, and said they were at peace with Great Britain, and wished to remain so. Mitchel was sentenced to transportation, and the heads of the deputation to Paris were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. Their sentences were, however, commuted to transportation, and then the fate which so often throws a ludicrous aspect over Irish revolutionary affairs overtook them; they denied the right of the Crown to reduce the severity of their sentences, and demanded that they should either be set at liberty, or hanged, drawn, and quartered,—a request which it is needless to say was disregarded.

But Ireland was not the only source of anxiety; there was a threatening of riot and pillage in Scotland, and one very serious rising took place near Glasgow. It was suppressed through the personal and moral courage of the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Sir Archibald Alison; but if it had been successful the whole of the manufacturing district of the West of Scotland would probably have taken fire. In England danger appeared to threaten from the Chartist movement. The Chartists gave notice that they intended to assemble at Kennington Common 500,000 strong, on the 10th April, 1848, and to march thence to the House of Commons, there to present their petition, which they said had received nearly 6,000,000 signatures. It is rather significant that Englishmen, even when they talk revolution, can, when it comes to action, think of nothing less constitutional than the presenting of a petition to Parliament. Sampson, the servant in Romeo and Juliet, is the typical English revolutionist. “Is the law on our side if I say—ay?” However, the Queen, the Ministry, and the whole country were alarmed. In London thousands of special constables voluntarily enrolled themselves, as a civil force, to help the military, if need were, to maintain order. The Duke of Wellington as Commander-in-Chief, directed special preparations for the defence of London; but with this usual good sense he took care that not a single extra soldier or piece of artillery was to be seen on the eventful day. The Admiralty, Horse Guards, and Treasury were strongly garrisoned and filled with arms; there were 800 men with cannon in Buckingham Palace, and steamers and gunboats lay in readiness on the river. Country gentlemen garrisoned their London houses with their gamekeepers armed with double-barrelled guns. As everybody knows now, it all ended in smoke. The 10th of April, 1848, came and went; the Chartists met at Kennington, not 500,000, but about 25,000 strong; their petition contained not six million, but about two million signatures, a very large proportion of which were fictitious. About 8,000 men from the mass meeting walked in procession towards Westminster. On being met on the bridge by a police force, and informed they would not be allowed to cross in mass, they bowed to the inevitable, and sent their petition to Parliament in three four-wheeled cabs! In this humble and unromantic manner ended the English revolution of ‘48. The whole movement was overwhelmed with ridicule, from which it never recovered, and the ordinary law-abiding people felt ashamed that they had allowed themselves ever to believe in its seriousness.

Constitutional government was stronger than it knew itself to be. It was easy to be wise after the event; but before, many brave hearts had failed them for fear. The Queen was, of course, specially affected by events on the Continent, as the monarchs whose rule was being either overturned or threatened were in many instances her relations and friends. She wrote on the 6th March to Stockmar, “I am quite well, indeed particularly so, though God knows we have had since the 25th enough for a whole life,—anxiety, sorrow, excitement.” On the very day on which the Queen wrote, a mob had rushed to Buckingham Palace, breaking lamps and shouting, “Vive la République!” However, their leader, when arrested, began to cry! so that he could not be considered a dangerous revolutionist.

It was in the midst of all this excitement that Princess Louise was born, on March 18th, 1848. With all the fear caused by the anticipation of the Chartist movement on April 10th, it is not surprising that the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, strongly urged the removal of the Court to Osborne. It is not impossible that the three-weeks-old baby was even more persuasive than the Prime Minister. However this may be, the Queen left London for Osborne on April 8th, not without some criticism from Greville. Greville was nothing if not critical; he had blamed Sir Robert Peel for resigning in 1844, and thus causing a ministerial crisis when the Queen was near her confinement, and he now blamed Lord John Russell for advising the Queen to go to Osborne with her new-born infant, in anticipation of a Chartist riot in London on April 10, 1848.

There was an immense feeling of relief all over the country when the day passed off so quietly. The popular feeling in London was manifested by the cheers which greeted the Duke of Wellington when he turned out early the next morning to his post at the Horse Guards. The Prince wrote to his private secretary on April 11th, “What a glorious day was yesterday for England.... How mightily this will tell all over the world!” The utter inability of the revolutionary germ to thrive in the soil of constitutional liberty was the lesson of 1848. Repeated illustrations of the same fact have been given in more recent times. After the explosion in Greenwich Park in 1894, caused by the Frenchman Bourdin, the police seized an anarchist club near Tottenham Court Road, and caught a gang of eighty men representing the anarchist propaganda in London. Every man but one was a foreigner, and the solitary Englishman was a journalist who had come, not to revolutionize, but to get copy for his paper!

With characteristic conscientiousness the Queen and her husband did not rest content with the fact that the social peace of England was not endangered. They felt there never would have been even the anticipation of danger, unless there had been much in the condition of the poorer classes which called for redress. They had not been many days at Osborne before they sent for Lord Ashley (better known to this generation as Lord Shaftesbury), and asked his advice as to what could be done to render more happy the condition of the poor. This was a subject which, as is well known, was to Lord Ashley, not merely an occupation, but a passion. His whole life, from youth to old age, was given to it; almost his last words, at the age of 85, when he knew he was dying, were: “I cannot bear to leave the world, with all the misery in it.” The Prince could not, therefore, have sent for a better counsellor. They had a long conversation in the gardens at Osborne. The Prince asked for advice, and how he could best assist towards the common weal. “Now, sir,” replied Lord Ashley, “I have to ask your Royal Highness whether I am to speak out freely, or to observe Court form.” “For God’s sake,” said the Prince, “speak out freely.”

Lord Ashley then advised him to throw himself into movements to promote the social well-being of the masses of the people, and to show in public that he was doing so. On the Prince asking for more detail, Lord Ashley urged him to come and see for himself how the poorest people in London lived; to go into their houses, and he offered himself to conduct the Prince over houses in St. Giles, near Seven Dials. He also urged him to take the chair a month later at the meeting of the Laborers’ Friend Society, and (with the little bit of worldly wisdom that guileless people so often pride themselves on) to come in semi-state, with several carriages, four horses, outriders and scarlet liveries. The Prince felt he ought not to consent to all this without asking Lord John Russell’s advice; but he gave a conditional consent. Lord John, however, was hostile, and offered strong opposition to the Prince acting on Lord Ashley’s advice. However, Lord Ashley stuck to his guns. He admitted that in any strictly political matter the Prince was bound to abide by the advice of the Prime Minister, but on a matter like this he advised the Prince to tell Lord John that “Your Royal Highness is as good a judge as he is.” Lord Ashley finally prevailed, and the Prince took the chair at the Laborers’ Friend meeting on May 18th, 1848. The outriders and the scarlet liveries were not omitted, and the Prince made a speech which Sir Theodore Martin says first fairly showed the country what he was, and gave a very important impulse to the manifold movements towards social improvement which have been so marked a feature of the present reign. Thus out of the “nettle, danger,” we were enabled “to pluck the flower, safety.”

[22] The poor excuse put forward by Louis Philippe was that the English Foreign Secretary, then Lord Palmerston, was manœuvring to bring about a marriage between a Coburg Prince and the Queen of Spain. There was no foundation for this charge; but Louis Philippe seems to have had a terror of Lord Palmerston which deprived him of all self-control, and capacity for judging of evidence.

[23] See Times, January 18th, 1895.

[24] Greville anticipated that the troubles of the time would affect him to the extent of the loss of half his income. He did not whine, but said, though he should not like it, he hoped and believed he could accommodate himself to the necessary change in his habits without repining outwardly or inwardly.

CHAPTER XII.
PALMERSTON.

With none of her Ministers has the Queen ever been in sharper conflict than with Lord Palmerston. From his third Foreign Secretaryship in 1846 till his dismissal in 1852, the history of their relations was one long struggle.

Palmerston considered himself the political inheritor of Canning’s foreign policy, and that he was bound, as the representative of England to foreign Governments, to be the upholder of political liberty and the foe of tyranny and oppression all over Europe. In this he carried with him the whole-hearted sympathy of the mass of English public opinion. It was not with his opinions and views, but with his way of giving effect to them, that the Queen quarrelled. But the English people were not in a position at the time the conflict was going on to make the distinction. They knew that the Queen and Lord Palmerston were pulling different ways, and that Lord Palmerston was the friend of Hungary, and Poland, and Italy; and in proportion as they gave their sympathy to these countries and to Lord Palmerston, they were hostile to the Court. Now, as their personal loyalty to the Queen was very strong, they sought to find a reason for the Queen’s opposition to Lord Palmerston, and they found it, or thought they found it, in the person of the Prince. The Queen’s husband was supposed to be a power behind the throne thwarting the will of her constitutional advisers in the interests of foreign despots. The popular view was that the Prince ruled the Queen, and that Stockmar ruled the Prince, and therefore that the policy of the court was not English, but German. That this was a complete misunderstanding, the publication of the “Prince Consort’s Life,” besides many other political memoirs and memoranda, has abundantly shown. But it was a very natural mistake, and from it arose, not altogether, it is to be feared, without the connivance of Lord Palmerston, a degree of hostility against the Prince which reached an extraordinary height during the early part of the Crimean War.

The question between the Queen and Lord Palmerston is no longer obscured by side issues; at no time was it based upon a divergence of political views. What the Queen, and the majority of Lord Palmerston’s colleagues in the Government, no less than the Queen, objected to, was his way of sending despatches, calculated seriously to embroil England with foreign Governments, either entirely without their knowledge and concurrence, going through the form of submitting despatches to them for their criticism and approval, and then actually sending off something entirely different. The despatches submitted by the Foreign Secretary to the Cabinet and to the Queen, and materially altered by them, would be sometimes recast by Palmerston in accordance with his original draft, and thus the Ministers and Sovereign were made to appear to have consented to that of which they had disapproved. At other times he would send important despatches to the Queen for her approval, allowing her quite an inadequate time to digest their contents, almost forcing the suspicion that he wished her to give her assent without knowing what they contained. When this practice was complained of by the Prime Minister, Palmerston excused himself by saying that the practice of sending off early copies of despatches for the Queen’s perusal had been discontinued, owing to pressure of work in the office; “but if it shall require an additional clerk or two, you must be liberal,” he wrote to Lord John Russell, “and allow me that assistance.” This plea of economy came rather strangely from a Foreign Secretary who in 1841 had appointed five new paid attachés without the smallest necessity, and who in one year had spent £11,000 in coach-hire to convey messages to overtake the mails with his letters. The fact is that Lord Palmerston was the sworn foe of despotism everywhere, except in the Foreign Office, when he was Foreign Secretary. In the Foreign Office he reigned supreme and absolute, and would suffer no control either from his colleagues or his Sovereign. With all this, it was impossible not to like him. He had a jollity, a bonhomie, a complete absence of rancor against those who had wrestled with him and thrown him, an easy elasticity, a buoyant faith in himself and in England, which won the hearts of his countrymen. He made mistakes and went through humiliations that would have crushed or imbittered any other man, without losing a jot of his buoyancy and self-confidence. He pursued his own line of policy with incomparable nerve and tenacity. If he triumphed, he crowed; if he was defeated, no one would guess it from his demeanor; he would be cutting his jokes the next day as “game” as ever. No nature could have afforded a greater contrast to that of the Prince Consort; and while one from sheer force and vigor, and the other by position and character, were prominent among the leading politicians of their day, they were certain to be in sharp and almost perpetual conflict. He thought the Prince’s hope of German unity a mere dream, impossible of fulfilment, and an alliance between England and Germany, therefore, entirely useless to ourselves. This brought them into political conflict just as their characters brought them into personal conflict. Two or three instances will suffice to illustrate what Palmerston was at the Foreign Office. In 1819, the Neapolitans being in insurrections against the infamous misgovernment under which they suffered, Lord Palmerston supplied them with war material out of the stores of the English Government without the knowledge or consent of his colleagues. Now it may be right or wrong to sympathize with insurgents; but for a Government of another country to supply them with arms is an act of war, of which no single Minister has the right to undertake the responsibility. On this occasion Palmerston was compelled to make a formal official apology to the King of Naples. A question asked in the House of Commons was the first intimation the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, had of what his colleague had done.

One of the special objects of Palmerston’s abhorrence was Austria; and it was a state of mind with which there was much sympathy in England. Neither in Italy nor in Hungary could the English people regard the Austrian Government otherwise than as a cruel and perfidious tyranny. This national feeling had burst out in England on the occasion of the visit to London in 1850 of the Austrian General Haynau. In Italy and Hungary the name of this man was associated with acts of barbarous cruelty in putting down the national movement. He was especially charged, and the charge was universally believed in England, with the responsibility of having ordered the flogging of women among the Hungarian insurgents. When in London he made a visit to Barclay’s brewery. The draymen and other employés got wind who their foreign visitor was; they gathered together in the yard of the brewery, and rushed upon him with a torrent of abusive epithets; the general cry was, “Down with the Austrian butcher;” they dropped a truss of straw upon him, pelted him with small missiles, and tore his coat, and knocked his hat over his eyes. He and his friends fought their way out of the brewery, only to find an equally warm reception outside from the people in the streets; he was again pelted, struck, and dragged along the road by his mustache. He finally got shelter in the upper part of a public-house, and the police contrived his escape by the river. The general feeling in the country was “serve him right;” but the Queen was seriously annoyed, and dwelt, not without justice, on the cowardice of an attack by a whole mob upon a single unarmed man. At the desire of the Queen, Palmerston expressed in person to the Austrian chargé d’affaires the regret of the Government at the incident; but at the same time advised that no prosecution should be instituted by Haynau, as this would involve a minute recapitulation of the barbarities of which he was accused. Palmerston’s private opinion on the affair was expressed in a letter to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, in which he says: “The draymen were wrong in the particular course they adopted. Instead of striking him, ... they ought to have tossed him in a blanket, rolled him in the kennel, and then sent him home in a cab, paying his fare to the hotel.” It may be easily imagined that he did not cordially respond to an order to send a formal written apology to the Austrian Government, and there was a prolonged duel between Lord Palmerston on the one side, and the Prime Minister and the Queen on the other, upon the wording of it. As originally drafted by Palmerston, it contained a paragraph implying that it would have shown better taste on the part of General Haynau to take his autumn holiday nearer home. This was corrected in the draft by the Prime Minister, and the correction was indorsed by Her Majesty; the amended despatch was then returned to the Foreign Secretary, who, in the mean time, had sent off to the Austrian Government the despatch as originally drawn by himself. Then began a regular pitched battle. Palmerston said he would rather resign than withdraw the despatch and substitute the one approved by the Queen and Prime Minister. Sir Theodore Martin says that Palmerston ultimately gave way. Greville says he never did. Mr. Evelyn Ashley says nothing. It is certain that the Haynau incident was for years considered enough to account for the hostility of Austria to England. It was for this that Austria alone of all the great Powers refrained from sending a representative to the Duke of Wellington’s funeral; and some people thought it was this that prevented her joining her forces to those of England and France in the Crimean War. But Palmerston was not long in giving Austria other items to add to her account against England.

When Kossuth was in England in 1851, he having been the leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian insurrection against Austria, he was received with tremendous enthusiasm all over England. The Austrians were furious, and their anger was intensified by the report that Lord Palmerston was going to receive him at the Foreign Office. Many politicians thought that this would be regarded by Austria as equivalent to a declaration of war. The Cabinet remonstrated, and Palmerston, to their relief and surprise, yielded. A day or two after this, Greville saw Lord John Russell and Palmerston at Windsor, “mighty merry and cordial, laughing and talking together. Those breezes leave nothing behind, particularly with Palmerston, who never loses his temper, and treats everything with levity and gayety.” But Palmerston docile was more dangerous than Palmerston pugnacious. The next week he was receiving addresses at the Foreign Office from Finsbury and Islington, thanking him for the protection he had given to Kossuth, and for the sympathy he had shown to the Hungarian cause. In his reply he gave warm expression to his sympathy with Hungary, and spoke of the position of the British Government as that of the “judicious bottle-holder” during the conflict between Hungary and her foe. The phrase has been remembered after the occasion on which it was used has been forgotten. The people applied it to Palmerston himself, and liked him all the more for it. But the proceeding was strongly and formally censured in the Cabinet and by the Queen. Her Majesty’s anger was not appeased by those who told her that although the Emperor of Austria might be angry, the action of the Foreign Secretary was not unpopular with the English people. Her Majesty replied:—

“It is no question with the Queen whether she pleases the Emperor of Austria or not, but whether she gives him a just ground of complaint or not. And if she does so, she can never believe that this will add to her popularity with her own people.”[25]

Lord John communicated the Queen’s views to Lord Palmerston, and he was especially cautioned as to the future upon “the necessity of a guarded conduct.” Lord John writing to the Queen was sanguine enough to hope that this remonstrance would “have its effect upon Lord Palmerston.” The ink of his letter was hardly dry when like a clap of thunder came the news of the coup d’état in Paris; Louis Napoleon, then President of the Republic, had had his political opponents seized in the night and thrown into prison, nearly 500 persons were shipped off to Cayenne without any form of trial, thousands were shot down in the streets, and the Prince President became first by military force and then by popular election Napoleon III. and Emperor of the French.

The Queen, true to her principles of non-intervention, at once wrote to the Prime Minister, instructing him to caution Lord Normanby, our ambassador in Paris, to observe strict neutrality, and to remain absolutely passive towards the new Government. Lord Palmerston accordingly sent a despatch to Lord Normanby in that sense. At the same time, however, that he was sending his despatch to Paris, he was seeing Count Walewski, the French ambassador in London, and expressing his entire approbation of the coup d’état and his conviction that the President could not have acted otherwise than he had done! On the 16th December he followed this up by a despatch to Lord Normanby, expressing his conviction that the action of Louis Napoleon was for the benefit of France and also of the rest of Europe. This despatch was sent off without the knowledge or approval of the Queen or the Prime Minister, and in contravention of their express wishes. This was the end. Lord Palmerston was dismissed, not at the instance of the Queen, but with her entire approval. Lord John Russell offered him, as a consolation, the Lord Lieutenantcy of Ireland and a British Peerage, both of which were curtly declined. The general opinion of the political world was that Palmerston’s career was over. Disraeli spoke of him in the past tense, as if he were dead. There was tremendous rejoicing over his fall in every stronghold of despotism in Europe, especially in Austria, where the heads of the Government took credit to themselves for his overthrow, and gave balls in honor of the event; a rhyme was current in Austria at the time which expresses the feelings Palmerston had awakened:—

“Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
So ist er sicher Palmerston.”[26]

In the debate in the House of Commons which followed these events, Lord John made a most successful speech, in which he showed the impossibility of working with a colleague who deliberately defied the express views of the whole Cabinet; he read the memorandum drawn up by the Queen for Lord Palmerston’s guidance on the occasion of a former dispute. In this paper Her Majesty had claimed her right to know distinctly what the proposals were to which she was asked to give her sanction, and, secondly, that, having once given her sanction to a despatch, it was not to be arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister. She also claimed her right to be kept informed of what passed between the Foreign Secretary and the ambassadors before important decisions were taken, and to receive the despatches in good time, so that she could acquaint herself with their contents. Lord John Russell completely carried the House with him. It was felt that the demands of the Queen and the Cabinet had been strictly reasonable, and that it would be impossible to carry on the business of the country on any other basis. Lord Palmerston practically had no defence, and he abandoned any attempt to manufacture one. Of the Queen’s memorandum he said not a word. Greville says the effect of Lord John’s speech was prodigious, and that Palmerston’s reply was weak and ineffective. He had resigned the seals of the Foreign Office before Parliament met, and Lord Granville had been appointed his successor. He bore the whole position with admirable good temper. He received Lord Granville with the greatest cordiality, spent three hours with him putting him in possession of the threads of his diplomacy, spoke of the Court without bitterness, and in strong terms of the Queen’s “sagacity,” and ended by offering to give any information or assistance that was in his power. He pursued the same line of conduct when in a few weeks Lord John Russell’s Government fell and was succeeded by Lord Derby’s; Lord Malmesbury becoming Foreign Secretary. Palmerston at once came to see him, and offered to coach him in Foreign Office policy. He gave the new Foreign Secretary a masterly sketch of the status quo in Europe, as well as general hints upon the principles by which English policy should be guided; the pith of these was, “Keep well with France.” By this means, though ousted from office, Palmerston remained practically the director of the policy of the Foreign Office.

All the contemporary records agree upon the main outward and visible facts; but they are provokingly silent upon Palmerston’s real motives. He was neither a hot-headed youth, acting on the impulse of the moment, neither was he “an old man in a hurry;” he was sixty-seven years old, about the prime of life for a statesman, and steeped to the lips in an absorbing interest in England’s foreign politics. His whole tradition had been to oppose despotism and support civil and political liberty against despots all over Europe. Why did he go out of his way to establish, so far as he could, a cordial understanding with a despot who was also an upstart, and whose Government was founded on violence, and carried on by crushing every vestige of liberty in France? Some have thought an answer could be found in his hostility to the Orleans family; but this does Palmerston less than justice. It is true he hated Louis Philippe, and rejoiced in his fall, which he attributed to the King’s perfidy about the Spanish marriages. When the French King was fugitive in England, Palmerston had tried to prevent his receiving the shelter of Claremont, although the Government really had no business whatever to interfere, as Claremont had been settled for his life on Leopold, King of the Belgians, and if he chose to lend it to his father-in-law, no one else had any business in the matter. Louis Philippe died in 1850, and in 1851, although Palmerston said the Orleans Princes were plotting for a restoration, and if Louis Napoleon had not struck when he did, he would himself have been overthrown, the excuse was not a good one. Some contend that Palmerston was afraid of the red spectre in France, and thought Louis Napoleon the only man capable of laying it. But Palmerston was not afraid of the reds in any other European country. The real explanation of his conduct must be sought elsewhere. At the end of 1851, it required no superhuman power of prophecy, especially to one who surveyed Europe from the watch-tower of the London Foreign Office, to foresee that the time was approaching when England would have to face the alternative of either relinquishing her traditional policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or fight Russia in order to sustain it. Palmerston, it need hardly be said, was all for fighting; but the question was whether England would face Russia alone, or whether Russia would restore the Holy Alliance, and thus lead a combination of European powers against England; or whether, as a third possibility, England could succeed in isolating Russia and in obtaining an ally for herself. It is not extravagant to suppose that it was to make this third possibility a probability that Palmerston hastened to make friends with a man whom he could not have trusted, and whose cruelty and despotism he must have loathed. It was impossible for England to look for any other ally. Russia, Austria, and Prussia were wild against England, regarding her as the great stronghold of constitutional principles, and believing that to her encouragement was due the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. The immunity of England herself from disorder did not open their eyes to see that it was their own misgovernment which had produced revolution. It only rendered them the more furious, as they believed that England had preached insurrection, while other Governments bore its penalties. It was touch-and-go in the first year of Napoleon III.’s reign whether he would try to put himself at the head of a European combination against us, or whether he would become our ally and fight one of the other Powers. He certainly believed that war was necessary in order to divert the attention of France from domestic politics, to conciliate the army, and thus on both sides to consolidate his own position. The almost universal feeling in England was that he was going to fight us. The common opinion was that the new Emperor’s first thought would be to avenge Waterloo. By 1853, however, Louis Napoleon had decided not to fight us, but to fight with us against Russia. This was due more to Palmerston than to any other Englishman.

Greville reports a conversation early in 1853 between himself and Comte de Flahault (afterwards French ambassador in London), who had just returned from Paris, where he had been in constant communication with the Emperor. Flahault said that the rancor and insolence against England on the part of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, were almost inconceivable; he added that Louis Napoleon had offered to him in the first year of his reign a position which it had been the object of his uncle’s life to attain,—the leadership of a European league against us; that he decided to decline these flattering overtures, and to consolidate his alliance with England. Flahault went on to say that he had supported Louis Napoleon in this determination, and had represented to him that the Northern Powers had long withheld any recognition of his Imperial position; whereas England had at once recognized him, and that if she had not done so, probably the acknowledgment of the other Powers would have been still further delayed. Flahault represented to Greville that, greatly to his surprise, the Emperor had wholly concurred in this view.

It is needless to say that the importance of this conversation is not derived from its truth, but from its representing what Louis Napoleon wished to be believed in England in the spring of 1853. He was strongly desirous for his own purposes of the English alliance, and knew that it was the only one he could hope for at that time in Europe. So far from declining flattering proposals from the Czar, his vanity had just been bitterly wounded by the absolute refusal of the Russian monarch to greet him as “mon frère.”

There can be little doubt that Palmerston availed himself of the Emperor’s isolated position in Europe, and “captured” him as an ally of England. It was the wish to secure him more surely that made Palmerston endeavor in 1852-3 to promote a marriage between Louis Napoleon and the Queen’s niece, the Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe. There was a definite proposal made to bring this about, the Emperor stating that his wish was to reserrer les liens entre les deux pays. The offer was declined by the Queen on behalf of her niece, on the ground of the latter’s youth and inexperience. In 1854, another matrimonial project between the two families was started with the same object, between Princess Mary of Cambridge and Prince Jerome Napoleon. Malmesbury heard of it, and said he hoped it was not true, for the sake of the Princess; but it was strongly pressed by Palmerston on the Queen, and was only put an end to by the Princess’s absolute refusal to listen to it.

If Palmerston ever believed in the Emperor’s fidelity to the English alliance, he did not do so permanently.[27] All through the negotiations which finally led up to the Crimean War, Palmerston and his coadjutor at Constantinople, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, urged on his country, not only to war, but to immediate war. Palmerston knew his man. It was Louis Napoleon’s present purpose in 1853 and 1854 to fight on our side; England’s policy, in Lord Palmerston’s view, was to clinch the matter before he had turned against us.

When Palmerston was dismissed in 1851, his defence of himself in the House of Commons at the opening of the Session of 1852 was such a complete failure that people went about saying “Palmerston is smashed.” But the epithet was misapplied. The Government of which he had been the life and soul was smashed. In less than three weeks’ time from the debate on his dismissal, the Government was defeated, and the Russell Administration resigned. Palmerston wrote to his brother: “Dear William,—I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last.” Lord Derby formed a Government which he invited Lord Palmerston to join. The offer was declined, but, as already pointed out, Palmerston continued practically to direct our foreign policy. The Conservative Government was of very short duration. Before the year was out, Mr. Disraeli’s Budget was defeated, the Government resigned, and Lord Aberdeen became the head of a Coalition Government formed by a union of the Whigs with the Peelites. In this Government, Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary. Greville mentions that when the Queen went to Scotland in 1853, she desired that Lord Granville should be the Minister-in-Attendance, because she did not wish for the presence of the Home Secretary at Balmoral. But this feeling was not of long duration. Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, labored diligently to change it. He told the Queen everything he could likely to make her regard Palmerston in a more favorable light, and showed her notes and memoranda by him calculated to please her. Lord Aberdeen also used his influence in the same direction. The Queen is never implacable, and always ready to recognize good service, and before the autumn was out Palmerston took his turn as Minister-in-Attendance on the Queen at Balmoral. An anecdote is told, illustrative of his continued absorption in foreign politics, although he was now Home Secretary. The Queen was much interested in some strikes and labor troubles that were taking place in the North of England, and asked Palmerston for details about them which, as Home Secretary, he might be expected to know. However, she found him absolutely without information. “One morning, after previous inquiries, she said to him, ‘Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?’ To which he replied, ‘No, Madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube!’” Palmerston was at the Home Office during the outbreak of cholera in 1854. His measures against it were said to have been conceived in the spirit of treating Heaven as if it were a Foreign Power.

Palmerston really directed the foreign policy of England from the Home Office during the year which led up to the Crimean War. When the Government refused to take his view, he resigned, ostensibly because he did not like Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill; really because when the Turks refused to accept the Vienna note, the majority of the Cabinet wished to leave them to their fall. Palmerston took an exactly opposite line, and urged the entry of the allied French and English fleets into the Black Sea, which really amounted to an act of war. As soon as he got his own way he rejoined the Government. As some excuse was necessary to the outer world, he had said he was not prepared to sit out debates on the Reform Bill in the House of Commons at “his time of life.” Clarendon said that no one had ever before heard him acknowledge that he had a time of life.

The Queen went heartily with Palmerston in his war policy. She was convinced of the justice of the Russian War, and that it could not have been avoided. Her intense interest in its progress will be described in the coming chapter. It is sufficient here to say that her former feeling of hostility to Palmerston was very much softened by seeing the whole-hearted devotion with which he threw himself into the success of the British arms. As is well known, the events of the war made Palmerston Prime Minister. She gave him her entire confidence in that capacity. On the signing of the Treaty of Peace in April, 1856, she bestowed upon him the Order of the Garter, as a special and public token of her appreciation of his zealous and able services to his country.

There was no love lost between Palmerston and Lord John Russell. In 1857-58, there was great uneasiness in the ranks of the Whigs, lest these two should never be able to overcome their mutual hostility. Lady William Russell said of them at this time, “They have shaken hands and embraced, and hate each other more than ever.” However, by degrees the stronger nature dominated the weaker, and from 1859 till 1865, when Palmerston died, Lord John may be said to have danced to Palmerston’s piping.

[25] Letter from the Queen to Lord John Russell, Nov. 21st, 1851.

[26]

If the Devil has a son,
Sure his name is Palmerston.

[27] See letter from Lord Palmerston to Lord Clarendon, vol. ii. p. 127, Ashley’s “Life of Palmerston.”

CHAPTER XIII.
PEACE AND WAR.

The year 1851 was memorable to the Queen, for it brought the opening of the Great Exhibition, the crown of success to prolonged efforts made by the Prince against all kinds of opposition and misrepresentation. When first the project was mooted, hardly any one had a good word to say for it. Members of Parliament in the House of Commons prayed that hail and lightning might be sent from heaven to destroy it; it was bound to be a financial failure; it would ruin Hyde Park; it would bring into London every desperado and bad character in Europe. Its actual success was beyond all anticipation, and was only heightened by the croaking which had preceded it. The Queen’s delight knew no bounds, for she felt not only that the whole thing was a magnificent success, but that it was owing to the Prince that it was so, and therefore was of the nature of a personal triumph for him. The Queen wrote about the opening ceremony as “the great and glorious first of May, the proudest and happiest day ... of my happy life.” In her journal she wrote:—