THE QUEEN IN SCOTLAND.
Christening of the Prince of Wales--Manufacturing Distress--Queen's
Efforts to alleviate it--Assesses Herself to the Income Tax--Resolves
to Visit Scotland--Embarks at Woolwich--Beacon Fires in the Firth of
Forth--Landing on Scottish Soil--A Disappointment--Formal Entry into
Edinburgh--Richness of Historical and Ancestral Associations--The
Queen on the Castle Rock--A Highland Welcome--Departure from Scotland.
The Session of 1842 was opened by the Queen in person with unusual
splendour, which was enhanced by the presence of the King of Prussia, who
had come over to stand sponsor to the Prince of Wales. The christening was
performed on the 25th of January, and was attended with all due
magnificence, and succeeded by a splendid banquet. Mr. Raikes, in his
amusing, valuable journal, thus records the event:--
_Tuesday, 25th._--The day of the Royal christening at Windsor. The
Prince of Wales is named Albert Edward. All who have been there say
that the scene was very magnificent, and the display of plate at the
banquet superb. After the ceremony a silver-embossed vessel containing
a whole hogshead of mulled claret was introduced, and served in
bucketfuls to the company, who drank the young Prince's health. Very
few ladies were invited.
[Sidenote: NATIONAL DISTRESS AND ROYAL SYMPATHY.]
The Queen's speech of this year noticed with deep regret the continued
distress in the manufacturing districts of the country, and bore testimony
to the exemplary patience and fortitude with which it had been borne.
Many people began once more to murmur at the continued flow of gaiety at
Windsor where the young parents still seemed to experience the first
thrills of transport at the birth of a son and heir. Some of the lowest
class of seditious newspapers began the practice of printing in parallel
columns the description of the fancy dresses at the Queen's balls (the
purchase and preparation of which must certainly have tended to alleviate
the distress), &c., and reports from the pauperised districts, records of
deaths from starvation, and the like. Among the unthinking classes such
disloyal practices produced a very deep feeling of dissatisfaction. In the
course of the year two attempts were reported as having been made upon the
Queen's life: one, however, being merely the freak of an ill-natured boy,
but the other was of a much more serious description, and cost its author
transportation for life. Sir Robert Peel felt it his duty to discharge the
part of a faithful Minister, and to counsel his Royal mistress to lessen
the gaieties of the Court, even if it were only in deference to the
prejudices of the starving and maddened poor. He neither roused nor
augmented her fears, but gave her the counsel which the time required. The
Queen at once acted, and without taking offence, upon the Minister's
advice. At the christening of the Prince of Wales all the ladies of the
Court appeared in Paisley shawls, English lace, and other articles of home
manufacture. And when the christening was over a marked sobriety settled
down over the Court, and continued during all the summer of 1842. Even the
most querulous speedily granted that they had no reason to complain.
This change in the sentiments of the public, especially its lower and more
distressed portions, was promoted and accelerated by an act, equally
tasteful and touching, of Her Majesty during this year. In the spring of
1842, Sir Robert Peel, now thoroughly warm in his seat as Premier,
commanding a large working majority, and not yet having awakened the
hostility of the decidedly Protectionist section of his followers,
inaugurated that splendid series of bravely devised measures in the
direction of Free Trade, of which the great Anti-Corn Law Act of four
years later was, so far as he was concerned, the culmination. In 1842,
Peel proposed and carried a Budget which considerably lessened the burden
of Customs imposts, but the chief merit and recommendation of which
consisted in the fact that it relieved the nation of the incubus of a host
of very galling excise duties on such articles of common use as glass,
leather, bricks, and soap. These beneficial remissions of taxation could
not have been effected by him--for they entailed a heavy cost upon the
revenue, already inadequate to meet the annual expenditure--but for the
re-imposition of an Income Tax, a means of raising revenue which had been
long disused, to the extent of sevenpence in the pound on all incomes
above L150 of annual value. This, of course, did not affect the allowance
made to the Sovereign. Nevertheless, Her Majesty evinced her sympathy at
once with the prevailing distress and with the daring fiscal expedient of
the Premier, by coming forward unsolicited to offer to receive an
abatement of her income, based upon the precise scale of that imposed by
Parliament upon her subjects.
Up to the Queen's reign, the members of the House of Brunswick had never
been peripatetic in their tendencies. The first two Georges had made
frequent visits to their patrimonial German electorate, but they evinced
no desire to visit England beyond the immediate environs of London. George
III. never passed out of England; George IV. visited Ireland and Scotland
each on one occasion; but with these exceptions, hardly any British
highways were traversed by his wheels during his reign, whether as
Sovereign Regent or Regnant, except the great roads connecting his capital
with Windsor, Brighton, and Newmarket. William IV. was too old when he
came to the throne to make it at all probable that he would evince any
taste to visit any of the outlying portions of his dominions; nor did he
do so. Queen Victoria, as we have copiously seen in earlier chapters, was
from her very infancy habituated to moving about from place to place, and
all along she has proved herself as proud as Queen Elizabeth herself of
mingling with and showing herself to her people.
[Sidenote: FIRST VISIT TO SCOTLAND.]
For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to
the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they,
and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the
British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the
journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young
husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the
railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the
island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the
Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of
debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of
Edinburgh.
The expected visit was awaited and prepared for in the North with the
utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied
itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations,
burgher vied with noble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their
more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen
left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the
acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of
the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage
was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early
autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the
Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a fine _coup-d'oeil_ of
romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth
of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from
Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their illustrious visitors
with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though
of English birth, was chaunted right lustily by Scottish lungs and lips.
It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the
vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping
herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her
formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to
the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen
Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously
appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan.
[Sidenote: LANDING ON SCOTTISH SOIL.]
As she passed up the Firth, under cover of the gathering night, every peak
on either side of the estuary, from St. Abb's Head, which she had left
behind, away westwards to the Pentlands, the Lomonds, and the Ochils, was
surmounted by a blazing beacon--a splendid sight, and stimulative by
contrast to the imaginations of those who recollected to what different
uses beacon-fires on Scottish hills and Scottish Border Keeps had been put
in earlier days of the international relations of England and Scotland.
The fiery welcome was returned from the Royal yacht, by the letting off of
rockets, and the burning of blue lights.
At last the squadron came in sight in the roads before Leith, the anchor
being let down--"a welcome sound," wrote the Queen--at a quarter to one
o'clock on the morning of Thursday, September the 1st. Every one of the
heights on or under the domination of which Edinburgh stands, had been
crowded all the previous day with tens of thousands of spectators. All at
once two guns from the castle, and a signal flag hoisted from the summit
of Nelson's column, some 400 feet above the level of the sea, announced
the arrival. The Queen slept and rested herself after the fatigues of her
voyage on board the Royal yacht; and she took her good but inalert
subjects by surprise, by effecting her landing at an hour so early on the
succeeding morning, that many of them, wearied by their recent vigils, had
not yet left their couches, and even the corporate dignitaries were
subject to the mortification of not having the honour to receive and
welcome their Queen as her foot first touched Scottish soil. In their
absence, that pleasurable duty was discharged by Sir Robert Peel, and the
Duke of Buccleuch, whose guest she was about to be at his palace of
Dalkeith, and who had ridden immediately after her carriage, as
Captain-General of her body-guard of Scottish Archers, on the day on which
she was crowned queen at Westminster. Sir Robert Peel told the Queen that
the people were all in the highest glee and good humour, though a little
disappointed at the non-arrival of the squadron the day before, as had
been expected.
With the extraordinarily auspicious fatality which has made "Queen's
weather" so trite and proverbial an expression, the sun splendidly burst
forth at the moment of her landing, and continued to shine throughout her
progress through a portion of the New Town of Edinburgh; its bright
freestone streets and terraces sparkling in the clear, sunlit air--past
her ancient Palace of Holyrood, and so through fertile Lothian to the
mansion of the princely head of the old Border House of the Scotts. When
the customary ensign was hauled down from the top of the rugged Castle
Rock, and the Royal Standard was hoisted in its place, the streets at once
filled, and the loyal shouts of the crowds, who hastily assembled in no
small force, sufficiently atoned for the absence of those whom the
somewhat unexpected arrival balked for this one day of the delight of
expressing their devotion.
[Sidenote: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SCOTLAND.]
The impression which her first view of Edinburgh made upon the Queen was
very striking and most favourable. She thought it "beautiful, totally
unlike anything else she had seen." Even Prince Albert, a great traveller
while yet in his teens, and who had visited very many great and renowned
cities, also said it was unlike anything which he had witnessed. The
massive stone buildings, with not a solitary brick used in their
construction; the great dorsal fin of the High Street; the magnificent
situation of the Castle; the Calton Hill, guarded by mediaeval battlements
and crowned by Choragic temples, with the noble back-ground of Arthur's
Seat overtopping the whole, together impressed the youthful tourists as
"forming altogether a splendid spectacle."
As the carriages drove through the city, the Earl of Wemyss, who marched
by the Queen's side in his green uniform of a Scottish Archer of the
Guard, pointed out to Her Majesty the varied objects of interest on the
line of route through the eastern portions of the city to the Duke of
Buccleuch's palace of Dalkeith. When they got into the open country, she
was further astonished to find that not only all the cottages, but even
the fences dividing field from field, were also built of stone. The
peasants by the wayside were equally objects of curiosity and interest, as
they had "quite a different character from England and the English." The
close caps--_Scottice_, "mutches"--of the old women, and the long, flowing
hair, frequently red, of the handsome girls and children, were equal
novelties to the royal "Southrons." The Prince was struck with the
resemblance of the country people to Germans. Other Scottish specialties
appeared at the breakfast-table at Dalkeith, in the form of oatmeal
porridge and "Finnan Haddies"--the first of which, at least, found
immediate favour with Her Majesty.
The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved
for the Saturday after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by
the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain of
Buccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The
line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of
the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood
(which the Queen rightly pronounced "a royal-looking old place") to the
Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan's pedantic
Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting
prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be
surpassed, in any portion of Her Majesty's dominions.
[Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN EDINBURGH CASTLE.]
It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen passed this day. Every
one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which
formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway
along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately
proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being
most intimately associated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On
her way she passed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor,
was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the
adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who
built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed
that he was a "saur saunt for the Croon," she may have seen the
blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings
of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was
the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the
first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns.
Here was the ancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there
the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and
loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in
which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with
such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in
Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when
she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across
the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning
shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish
Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while
immediately beneath her lay the Grassmarket--at once the Tower and the
Smithfield of Scotland--where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively
their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.
As the cortege passed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had passed
when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she
received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the
Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old
costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders
headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the
topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and
Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o'er Loch Lomond and the
Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have
occupied and touched the heart of the youngest and the mightiest monarch
in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled
amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert pronounced
the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as "fairy-like,"
"what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture."
He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at
once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of
"Auld Reekie" (_Anglice_, "Old Smoky") into "the Modern Athens." The Leith
ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad,
ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives,
with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of
peculiar interest.
[Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN THE HIGHLANDS.]
Space fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the
Queen's first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she
received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of
her oldest nobles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as
that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could
not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque
accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the "garb of Old
Gael" still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace,
where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at
Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the
true and special elements of "Highland Welcome." She may be almost said to
have passed through a continuous succession of triumphal arches. Every
chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores,
and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. Balls, in which the
national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the noble houses of
whom she was the guest, constituted the chief feature, alternated with
deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats
on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the
Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.
The Queen was especially charmed with the beautiful situation of the
ancient city of Perth, and the enthusiastic reception which the multitudes
there assembled gave to her. Prince Albert, too, was delighted, and
likened the appearance of the place to Basle. At Scone Palace, which is
within two miles of Perth, a very natural object of peculiar interest was
the mound on which all the Scottish kings had been crowned. At Dunkeld the
Highlands were fairly entered; and here the Royal party were met and
escorted by a guard of Athole Highlanders, armed with halberts, and headed
by a piper. One of them danced the sword dance, with which the travellers
were greatly amused, and others of them figured in a reel.
The longest sojourn made in the Highlands was at Taymouth, the seat of the
Marquis of Breadalbane. The scenery here again revived recollections of
Switzerland in the memory of Prince Albert, who was particularly prone, in
this and subsequent visits to the North, to trace resemblances between its
scenery and localities which he had visited in the tours of his bachelor
days. The reception at Taymouth was magnificent, and quite captivated the
illustrious guests. The Queen wrote in her journal--
The _coup d'oeil_ was indescribable. There were a number of Lord
Breadalbane's Highlanders, all in the Campbell tartan, drawn up in
front of the house, with Lord Breadalbane himself in a Highland dress
at their head; a few of Sir Niel Menzies' men (in the Menzies red and
white tartan), a number of pipers playing, and a company of the 92nd
Highlanders, also in kilts. The firing of the guns, the cheering of
the great crowd, the picturesqueness of the dresses, the beauty of the
surrounding country, with its rich back-ground of wooded hills,
altogether formed one of the finest scenes imaginable. It seemed as if
a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his Sovereign.
It was princely and romantic.
Wherever the Queen rambled during her stay by the shores of Loch Tay, she
was guarded by two Highlanders, and it recalled to her mind "olden times,
to see them with their swords drawn." Walking one day with the Duchess of
Norfolk, the Queen and her noble companion met "a fat, good-humoured
little woman." She cut some flowers for the ladies, and the Duchess handed
to her some money, saying, "From Her Majesty." The poor woman was
perfectly astounded, but, recovering her wits, came up to the Queen, and
said naively that "her people were delighted to see the Queen in
Scotland." Wherever the royal visitors were, or went, the inevitable
strains of the bagpipes were heard. They played before the Castle at
frequent intervals throughout the day, from breakfast till dinner-time,
and invariably when they went in or out of doors. When rowed in boats on
the lake, two pipers sat in the bows and played; and the Queen, who had
grown "quite fond" of the bagpipes, was reminded of the lines of Scott,
with whose poems she had, from an early age, possessed the most intimate
familiarity:--
"See the proud pipers in the bow,
And mark the gaudy streamers flow
From their loud chambers down, and sweep
The furrow'd bosom of the deep,
As, rushing through the lake amain,
They plied the ancient Highland strain."
[Sidenote: DEPARTURE FROM SCOTLAND.]
On the 13th of September the return journey from the Highlands by
Stirling, the ancient Castle of which was visited, to Dalkeith Palace, had
been completed. Two days later the Queen and Prince re-embarked at
Granton, _en route_ for Woolwich and Windsor.
Although a by no means excessive quantity of time--but a fortnight--was
consumed in the tour, some idea of the rapidity with which distances were
traversed, and the extent of ground covered, may be gathered from the fact
that no fewer than 656 post-horses were employed. The Queen touched the
hearts of the Highlanders--among whom Jacobitism remained, not as an
element of personal devotion to a fallen house, but not the less as a deep
chord of pathos and poetry--by commanding a Scottish vocalist, at a
concert given in her honour at Blair Athole, to sing two of the most
beloved of Jacobite songs--"Cam' ye by Athole," and "Wae's me for Prince
Charlie." When she once more embarked at Granton on her homeward route,
she left memories of pleasure and affection which far exceeded the
intensely ardent excitement which had preceded and greeted her landing. On
the last day which she spent in Scotland, the Queen wrote in her
journal--"This is our last day in Scotland; it is really a delightful
country, and I am very sorry to leave it." And the day after, watching its
vanishing coast--"As the fair shores of Scotland receded more and more
from our view, we felt quite sad that this very pleasant and interesting
tour was over; but we shall never forget it."