DEATHS OF LORD PALMERSTON AND THE KING OF THE BELGIANS--THE QUEEN
AGAIN OPENS PARLIAMENT IN PERSON, &C., &C.
The Prime Minister so long connected with the Queen, Lord Palmerston,
energetic to the last, died at Brockett Hall on the 18th of October.
A still greater loss befell her Majesty in the month of December--a
marked month in her history. King Leopold died on the 9th at Laeken,
within a few days of attaining his seventy-sixth year, the last of a
family of nine sons and daughters. He had been cured of a deadly
disease by a painful and dangerous operation two years before. He had
suffered afterwards from a slight shock of paralysis, which had not
prevented him from coming to England to be present at the baptism of
Prince Victor of Wales, the fifth generation, counting that of George
III., which King Leopold had known in connection with the English
throne. In addition to his fine mental qualities, he was singularly
active in his habits to the end. He walked thirty miles, and shot for
six hours in winter snow, after he had entered his seventy-fifth year.
Though the Queen must have been prepared for the event, and his death
was peaceful, it was a blow to her--much of her early past perished
with her life-long friend and counsellor.
In 1866 the Queen opened Parliament in person for the first time since
the death of the Prince Consort, and there was a great assemblage to
hail her reappearance when she entered, not by the State, but by the
Peers' entrance. There were none of the flourishes of trumpets which
had formerly announced her arrival--solemn silence prevailed. She did
not wear the robes of state, they were merely laid upon the throne.
Her Majesty was accompanied by the Princesses Helena and Louise. When
the Queen was seated on the throne the Prince of Wales took his seat
on her right, while the Princesses stood on her left. Behind the Queen
was the Duchess of Wellington, as mistress of the robes, and a lady in
waiting. Her Majesty's dress was dark purple velvet bordered with
ermine; she wore a tiara of diamonds with a white gauze veil falling
down behind. The speech, which in one passage announced the coming
marriage of Princess Helena and Prince Christian (who sat near the end
of one of the ambassadors' benches) was read by the Lord Chancellor.
The Parliament granted to Prince Alfred an annuity of fifteen thousand
pounds--voted in turn to each of his younger brothers on their coming
of age--and to Princess Helena a dowry of thirty thousand and an
annuity of six thousand pounds, similar to what had been granted to
Princess Alice and was to be voted to Princess Louise.
In March the Queen instituted the "Albert Medal," as a decoration for
those who had saved life from shipwreck and from peril at sea, and for
the first time during five-years revisited the camp at Aldershot and
reviewed the troops. She was accompanied by Princess Helena and the
Princess Hohenlohe, who was on a visit to England.
Queen Amélie died at Claremont on the 24th of March, aged eighty-three
years.
On the 25th of May Prince Alfred was created Earl of Ulster, Earl of
Kent, and Duke of Edinburgh.
The Princess Mary of Cambridge was married to the Prince of Teck on
the 12th of June, in the presence of the Queen, in the parish church
of Kew, where the bride had been confirmed, "among her own people."
Parliament granted her an annuity of five thousand pounds.
Another marriage, that of Princess Helena, was celebrated in St.
George's Chapel, Windsor, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Bishop of London, on the 7th of July. The bridegroom was supported by
Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein and Prince Edward of Saxe-
Weimar. The bride entered between her Majesty and the Prince of Wales.
The usual eight noble bridesmaids followed. Prince Christian was in
his thirty-sixth, Princess Helena in her twenty-first year. Their home
has been first at Frogmore and afterwards at Cumberland Lodge.
While the German war which had Schleswig-Holstein for a bone of
contention was still only threatening, the Crown Princess of Prussia
lost a fine child, Prince Sigismund.
Afterwards the Queen had the pain of seeing her married children, with
their unfailing family affection, inevitably ranged on different sides
in the war. Princess Alice trembled before the fear of a widowhood
like her mother's as the sound of the firing of the Prussian army,
which lay between the wife at home and the husband in the field, was
heard in Darmstadt. The quiet little town fell into the hands of the
enemy, and was at once poverty and pestilence stricken, small-pox and
cholera having broken out in the hospitals, where the Princess was
labouring devotedly to succour the wounded. In such circumstances,
while the standard of her husband's regiment lay hidden in her room,
Princess Louis's third daughter was both. Happily peace was soon
proclaimed. In honour of it the baby, Princess Irene, whose godfathers
were the officers and men of her father's regiment, received her name.
This year Hanover ceased to be an independent state, and became
annexed to Prussia.
Dr. Norman Macleod has a bright little picture of an evening at
Balmoral in 1866. "The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel
while I read Robert Burns to her, 'Tam o' Shanter,' and 'A man's a man
for a' that'--her favourite."
Her Majesty sent her miniature with an autograph letter to the
American citizen, Mr. Peabody, in acknowledgment of his magnificent
gift of model lodging-houses to the Working people of London.
In 1867 the Queen again opened Parliament in person, her speech being
read by the Lord Chancellor.
The grievous accident of the breaking of the ice in Regent's Park,
when it was covered with skaters and spectators, took place on the
15th of January.
"The Early Tears of the Prince Consort," the first instalment of his
"Life," brought out under the direction of General Grey, with much of
the information supplied by the Queen, was published, and afforded a
nobler memorial to the Prince than any work in stone or metal.
On the 20th of May her Majesty laid the foundation of the Albert Hall.
She was accompanied by the Princesses Louise and Beatrice, Prince
Leopold, and Prince Christian, and received by the Lord Steward, the
Lord Chamberlain, and the Queen's elder sons. The latter presented her
with a bouquet, which she took, kissing her sons. In reply to the
Prince of Wales's speech her Majesty spoke in accents singularly
inaudible for her. She mentioned the struggle she had undergone before
she had brought herself to take part in that day's proceedings, but
said she had been sustained by the thought that she was thus promoting
her husband's designs.
In June and July the Queen of Prussia and the Sultan of Turkey came in
turn to England. The latter was with her Majesty in her yacht at a
great naval review held in most tempestuous weather off Spithead. In
the end of July the Empress of the French paid a short private visit
to her Majesty at Osborne.
On the 20th of August the Queen left for Balmoral. On her way north
she spent a few days with the Duke and Duchess of Roxburgh at Fleurs,
when her Majesty visited Melrose and Abbotsford. After inspecting with
great interest the memorials of Sir Walter Scott, who had been
presented to her when she was a little girl at Kensington Palace, she
complied with a request that she should write her name in the great
author's journal, adding the modest comment in her own journal that
she felt it presumption in her to do so.
During the autumn the Queen paid an informal visit to the Duke of
Richmond's shooting lodge in Glen Fiddich. On the first evening of her
stay the break with the luggage failed to appear, and her Majesty had
to suffer some of the half-comical inconveniences of ordinary
travellers. She had to dine in her riding skirt, with a borrowed black
lace veil arranged as a head-dress, and she had to go to bed without
the necessary accompaniments to her toilette.
In 1867 the terrible news from Mexico that the Emperor Maximilian
(Archduke of Austria and husband of the Queen's cousin, Princess
Charlotte of Belgium) had been shot by his rebel subjects, while his
wife was hopelessly insane, rendered it a mercy to all interested in
the family that old King Leopold had not lived to see the wreck of so
many hopes.
In 1868 the Queen gave to her people the first "Leaves" from her
journal in the Highlands, which afforded most pleasant glimpses of the
wonderfully happy family life, the chief holidays of which had been
spent at Balmoral. Her Majesty sent a copy to Charles Dickens, with
the graceful inscription that it was the gift of "one of the humblest
of writers to one of the greatest."
On the 13th of May the Queen laid the foundation stone of St. Thomas's
Hospital, and on the 20th she held a great review of twenty-seven
thousand volunteers in Windsor Park. Instead of her mother or her
little children, her daughter-in-law and grown-up daughters, the
Princess of Wales, Princess Christian, and Princess Louise, were in
the carriage with her, while in room of her husband and her brother or
cousin, her two soldier sons rode one on each side of the carriage.
On the 5th of July her Majesty, whose health required change of air
and scene, left for Switzerland, which must have possessed a great
attraction to so ardent an admirer of mountain scenery. She went
incognito as Countess of Kent. She was accompanied by Prince Leopold
and the Princesses Louise and Beatrice. The Queen travelled in her
yacht to Cherbourg, and thence by railway to Paris, where she stayed
all day in seclusion in the house of the English Ambassador, receiving
only a private visit from the Empress Eugénie--a different experience
of Paris from the last. The Queen continued her journey in the evening
to Basle, and from Basle to Lucerne, where for nearly two months she
occupied the Pension Wallis, delightfully situated on the Hill
Gibraltar above the lake. She made numerous enjoyable excursions on
her pony "Sultan" to the top of the Rhigi, and in the little steamboat
_Winkelried_ on the lovely lake of the Four Cantons, under the
shadow of Pilatus, to William Tell's country--she even ventured as far
as the desolate, snow-crowned precipices of the Engelberg. Her Majesty
returned by Paris, driving out to St. Cloud, and being much affected
as she walked in the grounds, but not venturing to enter the house,
where she had lived with the Prince during her happy fortnight's visit
to her ally in the Crimean war.
Three days after her arrival in England the Queen proceeded as usual
to Balmoral, where she took a lively interest in all the rural and
domestic affairs which stood out prominently in the lives of her
humbler neighbours. The passages from her journal in this and in
subsequent years are full of graphic, appreciative descriptions of the
stirring incidents of "sheep-juicing," "sheep-shearing," the
torchlight procession on "Hallowe'en," a "house-warming;" of the grave
solemnity of a Scotch communion, and the kindliness and pathos of more
than one cottage "kirstenin," death-bed, and funeral, with the simple
piteous tragedy of "a spate" in which two little brothers were
drowned.
Considerable excitement was caused in the House of Commons during the
debate on the disestablishment of the Irish Church, by the Premier,
Mr. Disraeli, mentioning the Queen's name in connection with an
interview he had with her on his resignation of office and on the
dissolution of Parliament. The conduct of Mr. Disraeli was stigmatised
as unconstitutional both in advising a dissolution of Parliament and
in apparently attempting to shift the responsibility of the situation
from the Government to the Crown.
The Queen lost by death this year her old Mistress of the Robes, one
of the earliest and most attached of her friends, Harriet, Duchess of
Sutherland.
In September, 1869, her Majesty, with the Princesses Louise and
Beatrice, paid a ten days' visit to Invertrosachs, occupying Lady
Emily Macnaghten's house, and learning to know by heart Loch Katrine,
Loch Lomond, &c., &c.
In November the Queen was in the City after a long absence, for the
double purpose of opening Blackfriars Bridge and the Holborn Viaduct.
Happily for the cheering multitudes congregated on the occasion the
day was bright and fair though cold, so that she could drive in an
open carriage accompanied by her younger daughters and Prince Leopold.
The Queen still wore deep mourning after eight years of widowhood, and
her servants continued to have a band of crape on one arm. Her Majesty
was received by the Lord Mayor, &c., &c. After Blackfriars Bridge had
been declared open for traffic her carriage passed across it, followed
by his. The same ceremony was performed at the Holborn Viaduct.
This season the Prince of Wales revisited the East, accompanied by the
Princess.
In 1870 the Queen signed the order in council resigning the royal
prerogative over the army.
On the 11th May her Majesty opened the University of London. She was
received by Earl Granville and Mr. Grote. Baboo Keshub Shunder Sen was
conspicuous among the company. The Queen received an address, said in
a clear voice "I declare this building open," and the silver trumpets
sounded.
Charles Dickens died on the 9th of June.
The Franco-German war, in which the Crown Prince of Prussia and Prince
Louis of Hesse were both engaged with honour, happily this time on the
same side, was filling the eyes of Europe; and before many months had
passed since "_Die Wacht am Rhein_" had resounded through the
length and breadth of Germany, the Empress of the French arrived in
England as a fugitive, to be followed ere long by the Emperor.
In the autumn at Balmoral, Princess Louise, with the Queen's consent,
became engaged to the Marquis of Lorne, eldest son of the Duke of
Argyle. The proposal was made and accepted during a walk from the
Glassalt Shiel to the Dhu Loch.
In November the Queen visited the Empress at Chislehurst.
During the war, while the number of the French wounded alone in
Darmstadt amounted to twelve hundred, and Princess Alice was visiting
the four hospitals daily, her second son was born.
The death of Sir James Clark, at Bagshot, was the snapping to the
Queen of another of the links which connected the present with the
past.
In 1871 the Queen again opened Parliament in person, with her speech
read by the Lord Chancellor. As described by an eye-witness, her
Majesty sat "quite still, her eyes cast down, only a slight movement
of the face." The approaching marriage of the Princess Louise was
announced, and reference was made to the fact that the King of Prussia
had become Emperor of Germany.
For the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, the Queen
spent the anniversary of their marriage-day at Windsor.
On the 21st of March Princess Louise was married in St George's
Chapel, Windsor, to the Marquis of Lorne. The bridegroom was supported
by Earl Percy and Lord Ronald Leveson-Gower. The bride walked between
the Queen and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Her Majesty by a gesture gave
away her daughter. Princess Louise was twenty-three, Lord Lorne
twenty-six years of age. The Princess has rooms in Kensington Palace
for her London residence.
Eight days afterwards the Queen opened the Albert Hall.
On the 3rd of April her Majesty visited the Emperor of the French at
Chislehurst--a trying interview.
On the 21st of June the Queen opened St. Thomas's Hospital, knighting
the treasurer.
This summer the Emperor and Empress of Brazil visited London, while
the Tichborne trial was running its long course.
On the Queen's return from Balmoral in November, she was met by the
alarming tidings that the Prince of Wales lay ill of typhoid fever at
Sandringham. The Queen went to her son on the 29th and remained for a
few days. The disease seemed progressing favourably, and she returned
to Windsor in the beginning of December, leaving the invalid devotedly
nursed by the Princess of Wales and Princess Alice--who had been
staying with her brother when the fever showed itself, and by the Duke
of Edinburgh. On the 8th there was a relapse, when the Queen and the
whole of the royal family were sent for to Sandringham. During many
days the Prince hovered between life and death. The sympathy was deep
and universal. The reading of the bulletins at the Mansion House was a
sight to be remembered. A prayer was appointed by the Archbishop of
Canterbury for "Albert Edward Prince of Wales, lying upon the bed of
sickness," and for "Victoria our Queen and the Princess of Wales in
this day of their great trouble." Supplications were sent up alike in
Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues. On the night of Wednesday the
14th, a date which had been dreaded as that of the Prince Consort's
death ten years before, a slight improvement took place, sleep at last
was won, and gradual recovery established. The Queen returned to
Windsor on the 19th, and wrote on the 26th of December to thank her
people for their sympathy.
On the 8th of February, 1872, the Governor-General of India, Lord
Mayo, was assassinated.
The 27th was the Thanksgiving Day for the Prince of Wales's recovery.
No public sight throughout her Majesty's reign was more moving than
her progress with the Prince and Princess of Wales and Princess
Beatrice to and from St. Paul's. The departure from Buckingham Palace
was witnessed by the Emperor and Empress of the French, who stood on a
balcony. The decorated streets were packed with incredible masses of
people, the cheering was continuous. The Queen wore white flowers in
her bonnet and looked happy. The Prince insisted on lifting his hat in
return for the people's cheers. The royal party were met at Temple Bar
by the Lord Mayor and a deputation from the Common Council. The City
sword was presented and received back again, when the chief magistrate
of London remounted and rode before the Queen to St. Paul's. Thirteen
thousand persons were in the City cathedral. The pew for the Queen and
the Prince was enclosed by a brass railing. The _Te Deum_ was
sung by a picked choir. There was a special prayer, "We praise and
magnify Thy glorious name for that Thou hast raised Thy servant Albert
Edward Prince of Wales from the bed of sickness." The sermon was
preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The return was led by the
Lord Mayor and Aldermen to the bounds of the City. When Buckingham
Palace was reached the Queen showed herself with the Prince for a
moment on the central balcony. There was an illumination in the
evening.
On the 29th of February, as the Queen was returning from a drive in
the Park, having come down Constitution Hill and entered the
courtyard, when about to alight, a lad with a paper in one hand and a
pistol in the other rushed first to the left and then to the right
side of the carriage, with arms extended to the Queen, who sat quite
unmoved. Her Majesty's attendant, John Brown, seized the assailant. He
was a half-witted Irish lad, named Arthur O'Connor, about seventeen
years of age, who had been a clerk to an oil and colour merchant. He
had climbed over the railings. There was no ball in the pistol, which
was broken. The paper was a petition for the Fenians. The public
indignation was great against the miserable culprit, who was dealt
with as in former outrages of the kind, according to the nature of the
offence and with reference to the mental condition of the offender.
The Queen, who had been about to institute a medal as a reward for
long and faithful service among her domestics, gave a gold medal and
an annuity of twenty-five pounds to John Brown for his presence of
mind and devotion on this occasion.
Her Majesty had gone to Balmoral for her birthday, and was still there
on the 16th of June when she heard of the death of her valued friend,
Dr. Norman Macleod. He had preached to her and dined with her so
recently as the 26th of May. What his loss was to her she has
expressed simply and forcibly in a passage in her journal.... "When I
thought of my dear friend Dr. Macleod and all he had been to me--how
in 1862, '63, '64, he had cheered and comforted and encouraged me--how
he had ever sympathised with me ... and that this too like so many
other comforts and helps was for ever gone, I burst out crying."
On the 1st of July the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh and
Prince Leopold and the two younger princesses, visited the Albert
Memorial, Hyde Park, which was complete save for the statue.
Three days afterwards, in very hot weather, her Majesty was present at
a great review at Aldershot.