QUEEN VICTORIA AT BALMORAL--KING EDWARD AT
DUNROBIN--ADMIRAL SIR HEDWORTH LAMBTON--OTHER
ANECDOTES
Invercauld, of which Lord Glenesk was long tenant, lies near
Balmoral; a name famous the world over as the Highland home of Queen
Victoria and then of the late King. A castle on which the very
German taste of the very German husband of the great Queen has left
its mark. It is no more a fine castle than Buckingham Palace is a
fine palace. It stands, however, in a beautiful country and some of
the best drives within easy reach are those on the Invercauld
property. They are private but all gates swing open to Kings and
Queens.
The privacy was one thing the Queen liked. So long as she was in the
Highlands the loyalty of her subjects was expected to manifest itself
by ignoring her presence. If you saw the Sovereign approaching you
effaced yourself. You slipped behind a tree or looked over the hedge
or retied your shoelaces. You might do anything except be aware of
this august lady's presence and recognize it by the usual salute and
the bared head {346} as she went by. The Queen was ever, as her son
was, insistent upon etiquette. No form of ceremony must be
neglected. But at Balmoral the etiquette consisted in the absence of
all form or ceremony outdoors. You were expected to know this, and
if you did not know it but stood at attention with lifted hat this
mark of homage would not be well received. I once heard a stranger
who had offended in this way say that the look upon the Queen's face
as she passed was a lesson not to be forgotten.
Her Majesty drove quietly about in a pony carriage with perhaps the
ever faithful John Brown in attendance to lay a shawl about her
shoulders or take one off, as he judged best. You might see him do
as much as that in the publicity of Hyde Park in London. It was
partly in the simplicity of this Highland life that the Queen found
repose. Her Majesty would sometimes stop at Invercauld House for
tea, apparently as one neighbour appealing to the hospitality of
another. But I imagine these impulses were announced beforehand and
that the list of guests at Invercauld was known at Balmoral. During
one week there was among them a lady who, for purely technical
reasons, was never received at Court though she went almost
everywhere else in London and had, and has, a position almost unique.
But so long as this lady remained at Invercauld House the Queen found
herself too much occupied with business of State to come to tea.
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Royalty knows, or knows about, almost everybody. The late King was
always the best informed man in his dominions. It was rare that he
met a man or woman whose face and history were not familiar to him.
He did once at Dunrobin Castle. This was not many years ago, when
the King and Queen were circumnavigating this island-part of their
Empire in the royal yacht. The yacht anchored for some days in the
bay off the castle. The King or Queen, or both, came ashore during
the day and returned to sleep on board. As the King, the Duke of
Sutherland, and Captain Hedworth Lambton, commander of the yacht,
were walking up from the pier through the gardens to the castle, a
man passed them. "Who is that?" asked the King. The Duke had to
admit he could not tell. "Oh, sir," said Captain Lambton, "don't you
know the castle is full of people whom the Duke doesn't know and the
Duchess never sees?" The King took this pleasantry as it was meant;
aware that there was beneath it just that evanescent adumbration of
fact which made it plausible.
Captain Lambton, then the Hon. Hedworth Lambton, brother to the
present Earl of Durham, is now Admiral the Hon. Sir Hedworth Lambton,
K.C.B., the youngest man of his rank in the service; or was when he
was made admiral. Noted for the quaint felicity of his sayings,
sometimes with an edge to them; noted for his service with the Naval
Brigade in South Africa and the relief of Ladysmith; noted as a
skilful seaman who had {348} commanded the cruiser division of the
Mediterranean fleet and afterward the China squadron. The Lambtons
are a family apart, and Sir Hedworth is a man apart, even amid his
own family. There are few men who give you a stronger impression of
having made their own that rule of life which consists in taking
things as they come. Struggling through the watercourses of the
veldt with his 4.10 gun, or on the quarter-deck of the royal yacht in
harbour with only duties of ceremony to perform, he is the same man.
He came to Dalmeny House for the week-end while the _Victoria and
Albert_ was lying at Queensferry. On the Sunday morning he asked
Lord Rosebery and his house-party to go with him to the yacht for
morning service. We drove through the charming park to the Leuchold
Gate and so to Queensferry pier, whence a launch took us on board.
The yacht has a displacement of something more than five thousand
tons. Those external lines of beauty which you expect in a yacht had
been omitted by the Admiralty designers responsible for this vessel,
but once on board everything is admirable. The ship was lying in the
Forth, above the bridge, waiting for Queen Alexandra to embark for
Copenhagen. Nothing could be smarter than the decks and the crew
except the officers; all in full uniform.
It was August, and though some Americans say the sun never shines on
these islands, there are moments of exception and this was one. It
was burning hot. Captain Lambton read the service, {349} his
officers and guests about him, the men in front, all amidships on the
upper deck. He came to the Lord's Prayer, the sailors all kneeling
and all caps off. In the very middle of it, without a change of
intonation or accent, he said to his men: "If anybody feels the sun
they may put their caps on." I suppose a super-devout churchman
might have been shocked, but the reader was captain of the ship and
he had no idea of allowing one of his men to have a touch of
sunstroke. It appears they were in no danger for not one of them put
on his cap. Nor did any one seem to think his captain's
interlocutory sentence out of place. I have seen often enough both
in the navy and in the army that the most rigid disciplinarian may be
of all others the most careful of his men's health and comfort.
In these Dreadnought days nothing of the pre-Dreadnought period
counts. But I was once on I believe, the first Dreadnought, of a
type long since antiquated, with a low freeboard forward and the
whole expanse of the forecastle deck so arranged as to be, with
reference to the rest of the vessel, a lever on which the Atlantic
might pile itself up. I asked the captain what might happen in a
heavy head sea. "The chances are," he answered coolly, "she would go
down head foremost." However, at the moment she was comfortably
anchored off Queensferry.
That danger exists no longer for the model is obsolete, and this
particular ship no doubt went long since to the scrap heap. But the
unsolved {350} problems of naval warfare are still numerous. A
fighting admiral in the British navy will tell you strange things if
he happens to be in a talkative mood. Nothing is better worth
listening to than the discourse of a man who has command of a great
fleet or of a great ship, whether of war or commerce. I quote one
sentence:
"You want to know what is likely to happen when two modern battle
fleets meet at sea, equal in fighting strength and under equal
conditions. No man knows. It has never yet happened. But the
chances are both would go to the bottom."
Out of many Highland incidents I choose one, for brevity's sake.
Invermark. A place renowned for many kinds of sport, salmon fishing
included. It belonged, when I knew it, to the late Lord Dalhousie,
who generally let it and confined himself to Brechin Castle, with
excursions to Panmure House. Invermark was a lodge and nothing more;
just room for half a dozen guests and their guns and servants. Lord
Dudley and the late Lord Hindlip had it together one year. Lord
Hindlip was the head of the great brewery firm of Allsopp & Co. He
announced to us one night at dinner that he must go to London next
morning on business. He went, returning two days later. He had
spent twelve hours in London. Somebody said "I hope your business
turned out all right." Lord Hindlip answered: "I don't know about
all right. I bought £750,000 ($3,750,000) worth of hops a price
which makes it impossible there should {351} be any profit in the
next twelve months' brewing." Nobody asked but everybody looked
another question: "Then why buy?" Lord Hindlip continued his
sentence as if he had not noticed our curiosity. "But if I had not
bought yesterday there would have been no brewing of beer at all for
the next twelve months, nor perhaps ever."
This was one of the houses--perhaps only those belonging to the great
brewers--where beer was served with the cheese instead of port. But
not the kind of beer known to the ordinary mortal. Beer specially
brewed, long kept, tenderly cared for, and somehow transformed into a
transcendental fluid, transparent, golden in colour, nectar to the
taste, strangely mild on the palate, but swiftly finding its way to
the brain if you were ensnared into drinking a tumblerful. There was
nothing to warn you unless your host warned you, which he generally
did not. He perhaps rather pressed it upon you as they do the Audit
ale at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a hospitality not free from
guile. That I knew through the late Mr. Justice Denham, who was my
host, and when I resisted he told me how Lord Chancellor Campbell had
praised the mildness of the ale, and had a second drink, and then a
third; and upon emerging from the buttery into the fresh air found
himself embarrassed; he, the hardest head at the Bar of his time. A
story which I hand on as a warning to the next comer.
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