THE QUEEN WEDDED.
Announcement of the intended Marriage to the Privy Council and
Parliament--Parliamentary Settlement of the Prince's Rank,
&c.--Annoying Circumstances--The Prince's Protestantism--His
Income--Arrival of the Bridegroom--Receives a National Welcome--The
Wedding--Honeymoon spent at Windsor.
On the day after the departure of the Princes, the Queen wrote letters to
the Queen Dowager, and the other members of the Royal Family, informing
them of her intended marriage, and received kind letters in return from
all. A few days later she and her mother came from Windsor to Buckingham
Palace, where Lord Melbourne submitted the draft of the proposed
Declaration to the Privy Council. His Lordship told the Queen that the
Cabinet had unanimously agreed that L50,000 would be an appropriate annual
allowance for the Prince, and that they anticipated no Parliamentary
opposition to that amount. He also stated that there had been a stupid
attempt to make it out that he was a Roman Catholic, and that "he was
afraid to say anything about his religion," and accordingly had not
touched upon it in the Declaration. This turned out, as we shall see, a
very unwise omission; it actually gave colour and consistency to the
absurd report.
[Sidenote: ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE BETROTHAL.]
On the 23rd of November, eighty-three members of the Privy Council met in
Buckingham Palace. Precisely at two the Queen entered. She evinced much
natural agitation, but was considerably reassured by a kindly and paternal
look from her staunch friend, Lord Melbourne; whereupon she read the
Declaration, which ran thus:--
I have caused you to be summoned at the present time in order that I
may acquaint you with my resolution in a matter which deeply concerns
the welfare of my people, and the happiness of my future life. It is
my intention to ally myself in marriage with the Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Deeply impressed with the solemnity of the
engagement which I am about to contract, I have not come to this
decision without mature consideration, nor without feeling a strong
assurance that, with the blessing of Almighty God, it will at once
secure my domestic felicity and serve the interests of my country. I
have thought fit to make this resolution known to you at the earliest
period, in order that you may be apprised of a matter so highly
important to me and to my kingdom, and which, I persuade myself, will
be most acceptable to all my loving subjects.
The moment the Queen had read the Declaration, Lord Lansdowne rose and
asked, in the name of the Council, that "this most gracious and most
welcome communication might be printed." Leave was granted, and Her
Majesty left the room, the whole ceremony having occupied only two or
three minutes. The Duke of Cambridge followed his niece into the
ante-room, and warmly congratulated her. The Declaration appeared in the
next _Gazette_, whence it was copied into all the newspapers, and was
joyfully read and received over the whole land.
There were now important questions to be settled, in Parliament, in the
Council, and by the exercise of the Royal prerogative, as to the future
rank and station of the Prince. Such were--Should he be made a peer? as
had been the last consort of an English Queen, Prince George of Denmark,
the husband of Queen Anne, of whom the only good thing that can be said
is, that he accidentally made Arbuthnot, Pope's great friend and
fellow-labourer, his Court physician. The idea of being made a peer was
strenuously, sensibly, and successfully resisted by the Prince. Then there
were the practical questions of his naturalisation, the selection of his
Household, his position in the scale of precedence, and his income. So far
as the Prince legitimately could and did meddle with the solution of these
knotty points, he showed, when necessary, great sagacity, and a firmness
very wondrous in one so young. From the very moment of his betrothal, he
regarded himself as the custodian and guardian of his future wife's,
rather than his own, independent position and unfettered dignity. It was
not himself, but the husband of the Queen on behalf of whom he took a firm
line.
The Queen wished to give her husband precedence next after herself. Some
difficulty was experienced in procuring the consent of the Royal Dukes,
but at last their scruples were removed. Only the King of Hanover
stubbornly held out, and the Duke of Wellington, in the House of Peers,
declined on behalf of his party to consent. The proposal was, therefore,
withdrawn from Parliament, but shortly after the Queen conferred a patent
of precedence by the exercise of her own prerogative. On a similar matter
of dispute, it was not until the Prince himself had pointed out the
unaccountably overlooked precedent of the privilege as enjoyed by Prince
Leopold in the life-time of the Princess Charlotte, that Garter
King-at-Arms could be induced to withdraw his opinion adverse to Prince
Albert quartering the Royal Arms of England with his own.
In the matter of his Household, the Prince's own admirable judgment solved
the difficulty with the clear adroitness of honest simplicity. He
stipulated that considerations of party should have nothing to do with
these appointments; that they should be filled by men of undoubted probity
and purity of character; and he indicated his decided wish that they
should be men of some kind of eminence; either very rich, very clever, or
men who had deserved well of their country in the field of science or of
arms. These wishes, to the Prince's considerable annoyance, were not all
closely followed out.
[Sidenote: ANNOUNCEMENT TO PARLIAMENT.]
The Queen was tremendously cheered when, in January, 1840, she went to
open Parliament, and no doubt was left in her mind as to the thorough
popularity of the proposed union. The announcement of her intention
contained in the Speech was a virtual repetition of that already made to
the Council. From both sides of both Houses she was personally
congratulated, and her choice approved, but the Duke of Wellington
strongly objected to the omission of the statement that the Prince was a
Protestant, with some shrewdness attributing its absence to Melbourne's
reluctance to irritate his Irish Catholic supporters. The Duke at the same
time repeated again and again his own perfect personal conviction in the
thorough fidelity of the Prince to the historic and heroic Protestantism
of his race. Lord Brougham spoke on this point, and very pertinently: "I
may remark," he said, "that my noble friend (Lord Melbourne) is mistaken
as to the law. There is no prohibition as to marriage with a Catholic. It
is only attended with a penalty, and that penalty _is merely the
forfeiture of the Crown_." In spite of this, a sentence asserting the fact
of the Prince's Protestantism was, at the Duke of Wellington's instance,
inserted in the Address agreed to in answer to the Speech from the Throne.
There remained only the question of the Prince's annuity. Ministers
proposed L50,000. A very large majority negatived a proposal by Mr. Hume
to reduce it to L20,000. But the Tory leaders supported a proposal of
Colonel Sibthorpe's to reduce it to L30,000, and by a considerable
majority this was carried. The Queen, and her uncle Leopold, were
extremely angry at the time at what they conceived to be the personal
slight conveyed in this fact. But the Queen, under the wise and placable
guidance of the Prince, afterwards learned to attribute it to the then
heat of party rancour, still unallayed after the Bedchamber dispute; and
the Prince at an early period of his residence in England contracted warm
and abiding friendships with many of the men who had most strongly
resisted Ministers on each of the above contested points.
On the 28th of January, Prince Albert, accompanied by Lord Torrington and
Colonel (now General) Grey, who had been sent to invest him with the
insignia of the Garter and conduct him in due state to England, set out
from Gotha, as we have already seen at a previous page. He was also
accompanied by his father and brother. After a passing visit to King
Leopold at Brussels, they were met at Calais by Lord Clarence Paget, who
commanded the _Firebrand_, and escorted the distinguished visitors to the
shores of England, at which they arrived on the 6th of February. After
magnificent and most hearty receptions at Dover and Canterbury, they
reached Buckingham Palace in the afternoon of Saturday, the 8th of
February, where the Prince found his bride standing with her mother at
the door, ready to be the first to meet and to greet him. Half an hour
later, the Lord Chancellor administered the oath of naturalisation, and
the Prince became a subject of Queen Victoria. A grand dinner to the
Prince, the Ministers, and the great officers of State succeeded in the
evening. The next day the Prince drove out, amid the cheers of immense
crowds, to pay formal visits to all the members of the Royal Family.
[Sidenote: THE WEDDING.]
Monday, the 10th, was the day appointed for the wedding, which was
magnificently celebrated in the Chapel Royal of St. James's Palace. On the
morning of that day a larger crowd assembled in St. James's Park and its
approaches than had been collected together in the metropolis since the
rejoicings at the visit of the Allied Sovereigns in 1814. Not even the
extreme inclemency of the weather abated either the patience or enthusiasm
of the multitude. After the ladies and gentlemen of the Households of the
Queen and the Prince had been driven along the Mall from the palace of
residence to the palace of state, and the carriages which conveyed them
had returned, the bridegroom was notified that all was in readiness for
his departure. He set out, dressed as a British field-marshal, and with
all the insignia of the Garter, the jewels of which had been a personal
present from the Queen, having on one side his father and on the other his
brother, both in military uniforms. He entered his carriage amid
tremendous cheers, and the enthusiastic waving of handkerchiefs by a bevy
of ladies privileged to stand in the grand lobbies of the palace, and was
escorted to the chapel by a squadron of the Life Guards. On the return of
the carriages which carried the Prince and his company, Her Majesty was
in turn apprised that all was in readiness for her departure. She, too,
was enthusiastically received, "but her eye was bent principally upon the
ground." In the same carriage with the Queen rode the Duchesses of Kent
and Sutherland. It was noticed as she drove along that she was extremely
pale, and looked very anxious, though two or three incidents in the crowd
caused her to smile.
On her arrival at her palace of St. James's, the Queen was conducted to
the Presence Chamber, where she remained with her maids-of-honour and
trainbearers, awaiting the Lord Chamberlain's summons to the altar.
Meanwhile, the colonnade within the palace, along which the bridal
procession had to pass and repass, had been filled since early morn by the
elite of England's rank and beauty. Each side of the way was a parterre of
white robes, white relieved with blue, white and green, amber, crimson,
purple, fawn, and stone colour. All wore wedding favours of lace,
orange-flower blossoms, or silver bullion, some of great size, and many in
most exquisite taste. Most of the gentlemen were in court dress; and the
scene during the patient hours of waiting was made picturesque by the
passing to and fro in various garbs of burly yeomen of the guard, armed
with their massive halberts, slight-built gentlemen-at-arms, with
partisans of equal slightness; elderly pages of state, and pretty pages of
honour; officers of the Lord Chamberlain, and officers of the Woods and
Forests; heralds all embroidery, and cuirassiers in polished steel;
prelates in their rochets, and priests in their stoles, and singing boys
in their surplices of virgin white.
Within the chapel, in which the altar was magnificently decorated and
laden with a profusion of gold plate, four state chairs were set, varying
in splendour according to the rank of the destined occupants, respectively
for Her Majesty, Prince Albert, the Queen Dowager, and the Duchess of
Kent. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishop of London,
having taken their places within the altar-rails, a flourish of trumpets
announced the procession of the bridegroom. As the Prince passed along,
the gentlemen greeted him with loud clapping of the hands, and the ladies
waved their handkerchiefs with at least equal enthusiasm.
[Sidenote: THE BRIDESMAIDS.]
In a few minutes the procession of the bride was announced by trumpets and
drums. It was of six or seven times the numerical strength of the
bridegroom's, and the beauty of the twelve bridesmaids, all daughters of
peers of the three highest grades, was specially commended. The Duchess of
Cambridge led by the hand her then child-daughter, the Princess Mary, "and
the mother of so beautiful a child was certainly not to be seen without
much interest." The Duchess of Kent appeared "disconsolate and
distressed;" while the Duke of Sussex, who was to give away the bride, was
"in excellent spirits." The Queen herself looked "anxious and excited, and
paler even than usual." She was dressed in a rich white satin, trimmed
with orange-flower blossoms. She wore a wreath of the same, over which was
a veil of rich Honiton lace, worn so as not to conceal her face. She wore
as jewels the Collar of the Order of the Garter, with a diamond necklace
and earrings. The bridesmaids were the Ladies Adelaide Paget, Sarah
Villiers, Frances Cowper, Elizabeth West, Mary Grimston, Eleanor Paget,
Caroline Lennox, Elizabeth Howard, Ida Hay, Catherine Stanhope, Jane
Bouverie, and Mary Howard.
After the conclusion of the marriage rite, the Queen hastily crossed to
the opposite side of the altar, and kissed the Queen Dowager, who was
standing there. She then took Prince Albert's hand, and passed down the
aisle. On the return to Buckingham Palace, it was observed that the
Prince, still retaining the Queen's hand in his own, whether by accident
or design, held it in such a way as to display the wedding-ring, which was
more solid than is usual in ordinary weddings. When the Queen had been led
into the palace by her husband, it was observed that her morning paleness
had entirely passed off, and that she entered her own halls with an open,
joyous, and slightly flushed countenance.
After the wedding breakfast the young couple departed, at a quarter before
four, for Windsor, amid the cheers of the undiminished multitude. Her
Majesty's travelling dress was a white satin pelisse, trimmed with
swansdown, with a white satin bonnet and feather. As the cortege passed
rapidly up Constitution Hill, the Queen bowed in return to the cheers of
her applauding subjects with much earnestness of manner. When the Queen
and Prince arrived at Windsor, they found the whole town illuminated, and
received a rapturous welcome from the citizens and the Eton boys, all
wearing favours.
[Sidenote: THE WEDDING-CAKE.]
We shall conclude this chapter, which we shall not desecrate by devoting
to any other deity than Hymen, by a brief description of the Queen's
wedding-cake, which, fortunately for our enterprise, we have succeeded in
disinterring from the contemporary records. It was described by an
eye-witness as consisting of all the most exquisite compounds of all the
rich things with which the most expensive cakes can be composed, mingled
and mixed together with delightful harmony by the most elaborate science
of the confectioner. It weighed 300 pounds, was three yards in
circumference, and fourteen inches in depth. On the top was a device of
Britannia blessing the bride and bridegroom, who were dressed, somewhat
incongruously, in the costume of ancient Rome. At the foot of the
bridegroom was the figure of a dog, intended to denote fidelity; at the
feet of the Queen a pair of turtle-doves. A host of gamboling Cupids, one
of them registering the marriage in a book, and bouquets of white flowers
tied with true-lovers' knots, completed the decorations.