The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen
V.1., by Sarah Tytler

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1.

Author: Sarah Tytler

Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6910]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 10, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF QUEEN VICTORIA V1 ***




Produced by Arjan Moraal, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





LIFE OF HER MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY
THE QUEEN

BY SARAH TYTLER
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
LORD RONALD GOWER, F.S.A.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.


Entered according to Act of Parliament of Canada, in the year Eighteen
Hundred and Eighty-five, by GEORGE VIRTUE, in the office of the Minister
of Agriculture.




PREFACE.


I have been asked to write a few words of preface to this work.

If the life-long friendship of my mother with her Majesty, which gained
for me the honour of often seeing the Queen, or a deep feeling of loyalty
and affection for our sovereign, which is shared by all her subjects, be
accepted as a qualification, I gratefully respond to the call, but I feel
that no written words of mine can add value to the following pages.

Looking over some papers lately, I found the following note on a sketch
which I had accidentally met with in Windsor Castle--a coloured chalk
drawing, a mere study of one of the Queen's hands, by Sir David Wilkie,
probably made for his picture now in the corridor of the Castle,
representing the first council of Victoria. Of this sketch I wrote as
follows:--

"I was looking in one of the private rooms at Windsor Castle at a chalk
sketch, by Sir David Wilkie, of a fair, soft, long-fingered, dimpled
hand, with a graceful wrist attached to a rounded arm. 'Only a woman's
hand,' might Swift, had he seen that sketch, have written below. Only a
sketch of a woman's hand; but what memories that sketch recalls! How many
years ago Wilkie drew it I know not: that great artist died in the month
of June, 1841, so that more than forty years have passed, at least, since
he made that drawing. The hand that limned this work has long ago suffered
'a sea change.' And the hand which he portrayed? That is still among the
living--still occupied with dispensing aid and comfort to the suffering
and the afflicted, for the original is that of a Queen, beloved as widely
as her realms extend--the best of sovereigns, the kindest-hearted of
women."

To write the life of Queen Victoria is a task which many authors might
well have felt incompetent to undertake. To succeed in writing it is an
honour of which any author may well be proud. This honour I humbly think
has been realised in the work of which these poor lines may form the
preface.

RONALD GOWER.




CONTENTS


VOL. I.

CHAP.
I.     Sixty-Three Years Since.
II.    Childhood.
III.   Youth.
IV.    The Accession.
V.     The Proroguing Of Parliament, The Visit To Guildhall; And The
       Coronation.
VI.    The Maiden Queen.
VII.   The Betrothal.
VIII.  The Marriage.
IX.    A Royal Pair.
X.     Royal Occupations.--An Attempt On The Queen's Life.
XI.    The First Christening.--The Season Of 1841.
XII.   Birth Of The Prince Of Wales.--The Afghan Disasters.--Visit Of The
       King Of Prussia.--The Queen's Plantagenet Ball.
XIII.  Fresh Attempts Against The Queen's Life.--Mendelssohn.--Death Of
       The Duc D'Orleans.
XIV.   The Queen's First Visit To Scotland.
XV.    A Marriage, A Death, And A Birth In The Royal Family.--A Palace
       Home.
XVI.   The Condemnation Of The English Duel.--Another Marriage.--The
       Queen's Visit To Chateau D'Eu.
XVII.  The Queen's Trip To Ostend.--Visits To Drayton, Chatsworth, And
       Belvoir.
XVIII. Allies From Afar.--Death And Absence.--Birthday Greetings.
XIX.   Royal Visitors.--The Birth Of Prince Alfred.--A Northern Retreat.
XX.    Louis Philippe's Visit.--The Opening Of The Royal Exchange.




CHAPTER I.
SIXTY-THREE YEARS SINCE.


The 24th of May, 1819, was a memorable and happy day for England, though
like many such days, it was little noticed at the time. Sixty-three years
since! Do many of us quite realise what England was like then; how much
it differed from the England of to-day, even though some of us have lived
as many years? It is worth while devoting a chapter to an attempt to
recall that England.

A famous novel had for its second heading, "'Tis sixty years since." That
novel--"Waverley"--was published anonymously just five years before 1819,
and, we need not say, proved an era in literature. The sixty years behind
him to which Walter Scott--a man of forty-three--looked over his shoulder,
carried him as far back as the landing of Prince Charlie in Moidart, and
the brief romantic campaign of the '45, with the Jacobite songs which
embalmed it and kept it fresh in Scotch memories.

The wounds dealt at Waterloo still throbbed and burnt on occasions in
1819. Many a scarred veteran and limping subaltern continued the heroes
of remote towns and villages, or starred it at Bath or Tunbridge. The
warlike fever, which had so long raged in the country, even when ruined
manufacturers and starving mechanics were praying for peace or leading
bread-riots, had but partially abated; because whatever wrong to trade,
and misery to the poor, closed ports and war prices might have meant, the
people still depended upon their armed defenders, and in the hardest
adversity found the heart to share their triumphs, to illuminate cities,
light bonfires, cheer lustily, and not grudge parliamentary grants to the
country's protectors. The "Eagle" was caged on his rock in the ocean, to
eat his heart out in less than half-a-dozen years. Still there was no
saying what might happen, and the sight of a red coat and a sword
remained cheering--especially to soft hearts.

The commercial world was slowly recovering from its dire distress, but
its weavers and mechanics were blazing up into fierce, futile struggle
with the powers by which masses of the people believed themselves
oppressed. If the men of war had no longer anything to do abroad, there
was great fear that work might be found for them at home. All Europe was
looking on in the expectation that England was about to follow the
example of France, and indulge in a revolution on its own account--not
bloodless this time.

Rarely since the wars of the Commonwealth had high treason been so much
in men's mouths as it was in Great Britain during this and the following
year. Sedition smouldered and burst into flame--not in one place alone,
but at every point of the compass. The mischief was not confined to a
single class; it prevailed mostly among the starving operatives, but it
also fired minds of quite another calibre. Rash, generous spirits in
every rank became affected, especially after an encounter between the
blinded, maddened mobs and the military, when dragoons and yeomanry
charged with drawn swords, and women and children went down under the
horses' hoofs. Great riotous meetings were dispersed by force at
Manchester, Birmingham, Paisley. Political trials went on at every
assize. Bands of men lay in York, Lancaster, and Warwick gaols. At
Stockport Sir Charles Wolseley told a crowd armed with bludgeons that he
had been in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution, that he was
the first man who made a kick at the Bastille, and that he hoped he
should be present at the demolition of another Bastille.

On the 22nd of August, 1819, Sir Francis Burdett wrote to his electors at
Westminster: "....It seems our fathers were not such fools as some would
make us believe in opposing the establishment of a standing army and
sending King William's Dutch guards out of the country. Yet would to
heaven they had been Dutchmen, or Switzers, or Russians, or Hanoverians,
or anything rather than Englishmen who have done such deeds. What! kill
men unarmed, unresisting; and, gracious God! women too, disfigured,
maimed, cut down, and trampled on by dragoons! Is this England? This a
Christian land--a land of freedom?"

For this, and a great deal more, Sir Francis, after a protracted trial,
was sentenced to pay a fine of two thousand pounds and to be imprisoned
for three months in the Marshalsea of the Court. In the Cato Street
conspiracy the notorious Arthur Thistlewood and his fellow-conspirators
planned to assassinate the whole of the Cabinet Ministers when they were
dining at Lord Harrowby's house, in Grosvenor Square. Forgery and
sheep-stealing were still punishable by death. Truly these were times of
trouble in England.

In London a serious difficulty presented itself when Queen Charlotte grew
old and ailing, and there was no royal lady, not merely to hold a
Drawing-room, but to lend the necessary touch of dignity and decorum to
the gaieties of the season. The exigency lent a new impetus to the famous
balls at Almack's. An anonymous novel of the day, full of society scandal
and satire, described the despotic sway of the lady patronesses, the
struggles and intrigues for vouchers, and the distinguished crowd when
the object was obtained. The earlier hours, alas! only gave longer time
for the drinking habits of the Regency.

It is a little difficult to understand what young people did with
themselves in the country when lawn-tennis and croquet were not. There
was archery for the few, and a good deal more amateur gardening and
walking, with field-sports, of course, for the lads.

The theatre in 1819 was more popular than it showed itself twenty years
later. Every country town of any pretensions, in addition to its assembly
rooms had its theatre, which reared good actors, to which provincial
tours brought London stars. Genteel comedy was not past its perfection.
Adaptations of the Waverley novels, with musical dramas and melodramas,
drew great houses. Miss O'Neill had just retired, but Ellen Tree was
making a success, and Macready was already distinguished in his
profession. Still the excellence and prestige of the stage had declined
incontestably since the days of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble. Edmund
Kean, though he did much for tragedy, had a short time to do it in, and
was not equal in his passion of genius to the sustained majesty of the
sister and brother.

In the same way, the painters' art hovered on the borders of a brilliant
epoch. For Lawrence, with his courtly brush, which preferred flattery to
truth and cloying suavity to noble simplicity, was not worthy to be named
in the same breath with Reynolds. Raeburn came nearer, but his reputation
was Scotch. Blake in his inspiration was regarded, not without reason, as
a madman. Flaxman called for classic taste to appreciate him; and the
fame of English art would have suffered both at home and abroad if a
simple, manly lad had not quitted a Scotch manse and sailed from Leith to
London, bringing with him indelible memories of the humour and the pathos
of peasant life, and reproducing them with such graphic fidelity, power,
and tenderness that the whole world has heard of David Wilkie.

The pause between sunset and sunrise, the interregnum which signifies
that a phase in some department of the world's history has passed away as
a day is done, and a new development of human experience is about to
present itself, was over in literature. The romantic period had succeeded
the classic. Scott, Coleridge, Southey (Wordsworth stands alone), Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Moore, were all in the field as poets, carrying
the young world with them, and replacing their immediate predecessors,
Cowper, Thompson, Young, Beattie, and others of less note.

Sir Walter Scott had also risen high above the horizon as a poet, and
still higher as a novelist.

A great start in periodical literature was made in 1802 by the
establishment of _The Edinburgh Review_, under Jeffrey and Sydney
Smith, and again in 1817 by the publication of _Blackmoods Magazine_,
with Christopher North for its editor, and Lockhart, De Quincey, Hogg,
and Delta among its earlier contributors. The people's friend, Charles
Knight, was still editing _The Windsor and Eton Express_.

In 1819 Sir Humphry Davy was the most popular exponent of science, Sir
James Mackintosh of philosophy. In politics, above the thunderstorm of
discontent, there was again the pause which anticipates a fresh advance.
The great Whig and Tory statesmen, Charles James Fox and William Pitt,
were dead in 1806, and their mantles did not fall immediately on fit
successors. The abolition of the slave-trade, for which Wilberforce,
Zachary Macaulay, and Clarkson had fought gallantly and devotedly, was
accomplished. But the Catholic Emancipation Bill was still to work its
way in the teeth of bitter "No Popery" traditions, and Earl Grey's Reform
Bill had not yet seen the light.

George III.'s long reign was drawing to a close. What changes it had seen
from the War of American Independence to Waterloo! What woeful personal
contrasts since the honest, kindly, comely lad, in his simple kingliness,
rode out in the summer sunshine past Holland House, where lady Sarah
Lennox was making hay on the lawn, to the days when the blind, mad old
king sat in bodily and mental darkness, isolated from the wife and
children he had loved so well, immured in his distant palace-rooms in
royal Windsor.

  His silver beard o'er a bosom spread
    Unvexed by life's commotion,
  Like a yearly lengthening snow-drift shed
    On the calm of a frozen ocean:

  Still o'er him oblivion's waters lay,
    Though the stream of time kept flowing
  When they spoke of our King, 'twas but to say
    That the old man's strength was going.

  At intervals thus the waves disgorge,
    By weakness rent asunder,
  A piece of the wreck of the _Royal George_
    For the people's pity and wonder.

Lady Sarah, too, became blind in her age, and, alas! she had trodden
darker paths than any prepared for her feet by the visitation of God.

Queen Charlotte had come with her sense and spirit, and ruled for more
than fifty years over a pure Court in England. The German princess of
sixteen, with her spare little person and large mouth which prevented
her from being comely, and her solitary accomplishment of playing on the
harpsichord with as much correctness and taste as if she had been taught
by Mr. Handel himself, had identified herself with the nation, so that
no suspicion of foreign proclivities ever attached to her. Queen
Charlotte bore her trials gravely; while those who came nearest to her
could tell that she was not only a fierce little dragon of virtue, as she
has been described, but a loving woman, full of love's wounds and scars.

The family of George III. and Queen Charlotte consisted of seven sons and
his daughters, besides two sons who died in infancy.

George, Prince of Wales, married, 1795, his cousin, Princess Caroline of
Brunswick, daughter of the reigning Duke and of Princess Augusta, sister
of George III. The Prince and Princess of Wales separated soon after
their marriage. Their only child was Princess Charlotte of Wales.

Frederick, Duke of York, married, 1791, Princess Frederica, daughter of
the reigning King of Prussia. The couple were childless.

William, Duke of Clarence, married, 1818, Princess Adelaide, of
Saxe-Meiningen. Two daughters were born to them, but both died in infancy.

Edward, Duke of Kent, married, 1818, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg,
widow of the Prince of Leiningen. Their only child is QUEEN VICTORIA.

Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, married, 1815, Princess Frederica of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, widow, first of Prince Frederick Louis of Prussia,
and second, of the Prince of Saliris-Braunfels. Their only child was
George V., King of Hanover.

Augustus, Duke of Sussex, married morganatically.

Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, married, 1818, Princess Augusta of
Hesse-Cassel, daughter of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. They had three
children--George, Duke of Cambridge; Princess Augusta, Duchess of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz; and Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck.

The daughters of King George and Queen Charlotte were:--

The Princess Royal, married, 1797, the Prince, afterwards King, of
Wurtemberg. Childless.

Princess Augusta, unmarried.

Princess Elizabeth, married, 1818, the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg.
Childless.

Princess Mary, married, 1816, her cousin, William, Duke of Gloucester.
Childless.

Princess Sophia, unmarried.

Princess Amelia, unmarried.

In 1817 the pathetic idyl, wrought out amidst harsh discord, had found
its earthly close in the family vault at Windsor, amidst the lamentations
of the whole nation. Princess Charlotte, the candid, fearless,
affectionate girl, whose youth had been clouded by the sins and follies
of others, but to whom the country had turned as to a stay for the
future--fragile, indeed, yet still full of hope--had wedded well, known
a year of blissful companionship, and then died in giving birth to a dead
heir. It is sixty-five years since that November day, when the bonfires,
ready to be lit at every town "cross," on every hill-side, remained dark
and cold. Men looked at each other in blank dismay; women wept for the
blushing, smiling bride, who had driven with her grandmother through the
park on her way to be married not so many months before. There are
comparatively few people alive who had come to man's or woman's estate
when the shock was experienced; but we have all heard from our
predecessors the story which has lent to Claremont a tender, pensive
grace, especially for royal young pairs.

Old Queen Charlotte nerved herself to make a last public appearance on
the 11th of July, 1818, four months before her death. It was in her
presence, at Kew, that a royal marriage and re-marriage were celebrated
that day. The Duke of Clarence was married to Princess Adelaide of
Saxe-Meiningen, and the Duke of Kent was re-married, in strict accordance
with the English Royal Marriage Act, to Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg,
the widowed Princess of Leiningen. The last couple had been already
united at Coburg in the month of May. The Archbishop of Canterbury and
the Bishop of London officiated at the double ceremony. The brides were
given away by the Prince Regent. The Queen retired immediately
afterwards. But a grand banquet, at which the Prince Regent presided, was
given at six o'clock in the evening. An hour later the Duke and Duchess
of Kent drove off in her brother, Prince Leopold's, carriage to
Claremont.

Of the two bridegrooms we have glimpses from Baron Stockmar, a shrewd
observer, who was no flatterer.

The Duke of Clarence, at fifty-three years of age, was the "smallest and
least good-looking of the brothers, decidedly like his mother, as
talkative as the rest;" and we may add that he was also endowed with a
sailor-like frankness, cordiality, and good humour, which did not,
however, prevent stormy ebullitions of temper, that recommended him to
the nation of that day as a specimen of a princely blue-jacket. Since the
navy was not considered a school of manners, he was excused for the
absence of much culture or refinement.

"The Duke of Kent, at fifty-one, was a tall, stately man, of soldierlike
bearing, already inclined to great corpulence.... He had seen much of the
world, and of men. His manner in society was pleasant and easy. He was
not without ability and culture, and he possessed great activity. His
dependents complained of his strictness and pedantic love of order....
The Duke was well aware that his influence was but small, but this did
not prevent him from forwarding the petitions he received whenever it was
possible, with his own recommendation, to the public departments....
Liberal political principles were at that time in the minority in
England, and as the Duke professed them, it can be imagined how he was
hated by the powerful party then dominant. He was on most unfriendly
terms with his brothers.... The Duke proved an amiable and courteous,
even chivalrous, husband."

Judiciously, in the circumstances, neither of the brides was in her first
youth, the future Queen Adelaide having been, at twenty-six, the younger
of the two. The Duchess of Kent, a little over thirty, had been already
married, in 1803, when she was seventeen, to Prince Emich Charles of
Leiningen. Eleven years afterwards, in 1814, she was left a widow with a
son and daughter. Four years later she married the Duke of Kent. The
brides were very different in looks and outward attractions. The Duchess
of Clarence, with hair of a peculiar colour approaching to a lemon tint,
weak eyes, and a bad complexion, was plain. She was also quiet, reserved,
and a little stiff, while she appears to have had no special
accomplishments, beyond a great capacity for carpet-work. The Duchess of
Kent, with a fine figure, good features, brown hair and eyes, a pretty
pink colour, winning manners, and graceful accomplishments--particularly
music, formed a handsome, agreeable woman, "altogether most charming and
attractive."

But both Duchesses were possessed of qualities in comparison with which
beauty is deceitful and favour is vain--qualities which are calculated to
wear well. Queen Adelaide's goodness and kindness, her unselfish,
unassuming womanliness and devout resignation to sorrow and suffering,
did more than gain and keep the heart of her bluff, eccentric
sailor-prince. They secured for her the respectful regard of the nation
among whom she dwelt, whether as Queen or Queen-dowager. The Archbishop
of Canterbury could say of her, after her husband's death, "For three
weeks prior to his (King William's) dissolution, the Queen sat by his
bedside, performing for him every office which a sick man could require,
and depriving herself of all manner of rest and refection. She underwent
labours which I thought no ordinary woman could endure. No language can
do justice to the meekness and to the calmness of mind which she sought
to keep up before the King, while sorrow was pressing on her heart. Such
constancy of affection, I think, was one of the most interesting
spectacles that could be presented to a mind desirous of being gratified
with the sight of human excellence." [Footnote: Dr. Doran] Such graces,
great enough to resist the temptations of the highest rank, might well be
singled out as worthy of all imitation.

The Duchess of Kent proved herself the best of mothers--as she was the
best of wives, during her short time of wedlock--in the self-renunciation
and self-devotion with which, through all difficulties, and in spite of
every opposition and misconception, she pursued the even tenor of her
way. Not for two or ten, but for well-nigh twenty years, she gave herself
up unreservedly, turning her back on her country with all its strong
early ties, to rearing a good queen, worthy of her high destiny. England
owes much to the memories of Queen Adelaide and the Duchess of Kent, who
succeeded Queen Charlotte, the one as Queen Consort, the other as mother
of the future sovereign, and not only served as the salt to savour their
royal circles, but kept up nobly the tradition of honourable women among
the queens and princesses of England, handing down the high obligation to
younger generations.

The Duke and Duchess of Kent withdrew to Germany after their re-marriage,
and resided at the castle of Amorbach, in Bavaria, part of the
inheritance of her young son. The couple returned to England that their
child might be born there. The Duke had a strong impression that,
notwithstanding his three elder brothers, the Crown would come to him and
his children. The persuasion, if they knew it, was not likely to be
acceptable to the other Princes. Certainly, in the face of the Duke's
money embarrassments, his kinsmen granted no assistance to enable the
future Queen of England to be born in her own dominions. It was by the
help of private friends that the Duke gratified his natural and wise
wish.

Apartments in Kensington Palace were assigned to the couple. The old
queen had died at Kew, surrounded by such of her daughters as were in the
country, and by several of her sons, in the month of November, 1818.
George III. was dragging out his days at Windsor. The Prince Regent
occupied Carlton House.

The Kensington of 1819 was not the Kensington of today. In spite of the
palace and gardens, which are comparatively little altered, the great
crowded quarter, with its Museum and Albert Hall, is as unlike as
possible to the courtly village to which the Duke and Duchess of Kent
came, and where the Queen spent her youth. That Kensington consisted
mainly of a fine old square, built in the time of James II., in which the
foreign ambassadors and the bishops in attendance at Court congregated in
the days of William and Mary, and Anne, and of a few terraces and blocks
of buildings scattered along the Great Western Road, where coaches passed
several times a day. Other centres round which smaller buildings
clustered were Kensington House--which had lately been a school for the
sons of French _emigres_ of rank--the old church, and Holland House,
the fine seat of the Riches and the Foxes. The High Street extended a
very little way on each side of the church and was best known by its
Charity School, and its pastrycook's shop, at the sign of the
"Pineapple," to which Queen Caroline had graciously given her own recipe
for royal Dutch gingerbread. David Wilkie's apartments represented the
solitary studio. Nightingales sang in Holland Lane; blackbirds and
thrushes haunted the nurseries and orchards. Great vegetable-gardens met
the fields. Here and there stood an old country house in its own grounds.
Green lanes led but to more rural villages, farms and manor-houses.
Notting Barns was a farmhouse on the site of Notting Hill. In the
tea-gardens at Bayswater Sir John Hill cultivated medicinal plants, and
prepared his "water-dock essence" and "balm of honey." Invalids
frequented Kensington Gravel pits for the benefit of "the sweet country
air."

Kensington Palace had been bought by William III. from Daniel Finch,
second Earl of Nottingham. His father, the first Earl, had built and
named the pile of brick-building Nottingham House. It was comparatively
a new, trim house, though Evelyn called it "patched up" when it passed
into the hands of King William, and as such might please his Dutch taste
better than the beautiful Elizabethan Holland House--in spite of the
name, at which he is said to have looked, with the intention of making it
his residence.

The Duke of Sussex, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had
apartments in the palace. He dwelt in the portion of the southern front
understood to belong to the original building. His brother and
sister-in-law were lodged not far off, but their apartments formed part
of an addition made by King William, who employed Sir Christopher Wren as
his architect.

The clumsy, homely structure, with its three courts--the Clock Court, the
Princes' Court, and the Princesses' Court--had many interesting
associations in addition to its air of venerable respectability. William
and Mary resided frequently in the palace which they had chosen; and both
died under its roof. Mary sat up in one of these rooms, on a dreary
December night in 1694, after she felt herself stricken with small-pox,
seeking out and burning all the papers in her possession which might
compromise others. The silent, asthmatic, indomitable little man was
carried back here after his fall from his horse eight years later, to
draw his last breath where Mary had laid down her crown. Here Anne sat,
with her fan in her mouth, speaking in monosyllables to her circle.
George I.'s chief connection with Kensington Palace was building the
cupola and the great staircase. But his successors, George II. and Queen
Caroline, atoned for the deficiency. They gave much of their time to the
palace so identified with the Protestant and Hanoverian line of
succession. Queen Caroline especially showed her regard for the spot by
exercising her taste in beautifying it according to the notions of the
period. It was she who caused the string of ponds to be united so as to
form the Serpentine; and he modified the Dutch style of the gardens,
abolishing the clipped monsters in yew and box, and introducing
wildernesses and groves to relieve the stiffness and monotony of straight
walks and hedges. The shades of her beautiful maids of honour, "sweet
Molly Lepell," Mary Bellenden, and Sophy Howe, still haunt the Broad
Walk. Molly Lepell's husband, Lord Hervey (the "Lord Fanny" of lampoons
and songs), composed and read in these rooms, for the diversion of his
royal mistress and the princesses, with their ladies and gentlemen, the
false account of his own death, caused by an encounter with footpads on
the dangerous road between London and the country palace. He added an
audacious description of the manner in which the news was received at
Court, and of the behaviour of the principal persons in the circle.

With George II. and Queen Caroline the first glory of the palace
departed, for the early Court of George III. and Queen Charlotte took its
country pleasures at Kew. Then followed the selection of Windsor for the
chief residence of the sovereigns. The promenades in the gardens, to
which the great world of London flocked, remained for a season as a
vestige of former grandeur. In George II.'s time the gardens were only
thrown open on Saturdays, when the Court went to Richmond. Afterwards the
public were admitted every day, under certain restrictions. So late as
1820 these promenades were still a feature on Sunday mornings.

Kensington Palace has not yet changed its outward aspect. It still
stands, with its forcing-houses, and Queen Anne's banqueting-room--
converted into an orangery--in its small private grounds, fenced off by
a slight railing and an occasional hedge from the public gardens. The
principal entrance, under the clock-tower, leads to a plain, square, red
courtyard, which has a curious foreign aspect in its quiet simplicity, as
if the Brunswick princes had brought a bit of Germany along with them
when they came to reign here; and there are other red courtyards, equally
unpretentious, with more or less old-fashioned doors and windows. Within,
the building has sustained many alterations. Since it ceased to be a seat
of the Court, the palace has furnished residences for various members of
the royal family, and for different officials. Accordingly, the interior
has been divided and partitioned off to suit the requirements of separate
households. But the great staircase, imposing in its broad, shallow steps
of black marble and its faded frescoes, still conducts to a succession of
dismantled Presence-chambers and State-rooms. The pictures and tapestry
have been taken from the walls, the old panelling is bare. The
distinctions which remain are the fine proportions of the apartments--
the marble pillars and niches of one; the remains of a richly-carved
chimneypiece in another; the highly-wrought ceilings, to which ancient
history and allegory have supplied grandiose figures--their deep colours
unfaded, the ruddy burnish of their gilding as splendid as ever. Here and
there great black-and-gold court-stools, raised at the sides, and
finished off with bullet heads of dogs, arouse a recollection of
Versailles or Fontainebleau, and look as if they had offered seats to
Court ladies in hoops and brocades, and gentlemen-in-waiting in velvet
coats and breeches and lace cravats. One seat is more capacious than the
others, with a round back, and in its heavy black-and-gold has the look
of an informal throne. It might easily have borne the gallant William, or
even the extensive proportions of Anne.

There is a word dropped of "old kings" having died in the closed rooms
behind these doors. George II., in his old age? or William, worn out in
his prime? or it may be heavy, pacific George of Denmark, raised to the
kingly rank by the courtesy of vague tradition? The old chapel was in
this part of the house. Leigh Hunt tells us it was in this chapel George
I. asked the bishops to have good short sermons, because he was an old
man, and when he was kept long, he fell asleep and caught cold. It must
have been a curious old chapel, with a round window admitting scanty
light. The household and servants sat below, while a winding staircase
led round and up to a closed gallery in near proximity to the pulpit. It
was only a man's conscience, or a sense of what was due to his physical
well-being, which could convict him of slumbering in such a peaceful
retreat. It is said that her late Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent
objected to the obscurity of this place of worship, and, to meet her
objections, the present little chapel was fitted up.

The Duchess of Kent's rooms were in an adjacent wing; spacious rooms
enough, and only looking the more habitable and comfortable for the
moderate height of the ceilings. In a room with three windows on one
side, looking out on the private grounds, the Queen was born. It was
thinking of it and its occupants that the warm-hearted, quick-witted
Duchess-mother, in Coburg, wrote: "I cannot express how happy I am to
know you, dearest, dearest Vickel, safe in your bed, with a little
one.... Again a Charlotte--destined, perhaps, to play a great part one
day, if a brother is not born to take it out of her hands. The English
like queens; and the niece (by marriage) of the ever-lamented, beloved
Charlotte, will be most dear to them."

In another wide, low room, with white pillars, some eighteen years later,
the baby Princess, become a maiden Queen, held her first Council,
surrounded by kindred who had stood at her font--hoary heads wise in
statecraft, great prelates, great lawyers, a great soldier, and she an
innocent girl at their head. No relic could leave such an impression as
this room, with its wonderfully pathetic scene. But, indeed, there are
few other traces of the life that budded into dawning womanhood here,
which will be always linked with the memories of Kensington Palace. An
upper room, sunny and cheerful, even on a winter's day, having a pleasant
view out on the open gardens, with their straight walks and great pond,
where a child might forget sometimes that she had lessons to learn, was a
princess's school-room. Here the good Baroness who played the part of
governess so sagaciously and faithfully may have slipped into the book of
history the genealogical table which was to tell so startling a tale. In
another room is a quaint little doll's-house, with the different rooms,
which an active-minded child loved to arrange. The small frying-pans and
plates still hang above the kitchen dresser; the cook stands unwearied by
the range; the chairs are placed round the tables; the tiny tea-service,
which tiny fingers delighted to handle, is set out ready for company. But
the owner has long done with make-believes, has worked in earnest,
discharged great tasks, and borne the burden and heat of the day, in
reigning over a great empire.



CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD.


In the months of March and May, 1819, the following announcements of royal
births appeared in succession in the newspapers of the day, no doubt to
the satisfaction alike of anxious statesmen and village politicians
beginning to grow anxious over the chances of the succession:--

"At Hanover, March 26, her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge, of a
son; and on March 27, her Royal Highness the Duchess of Clarence, of a
daughter, the latter only surviving a few hours."

"24th May, at Kensington Palace, her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent,
of a daughter."

"27th May, at her hotel in Berlin, her Royal Highness the Duchess of
Cumberland, of a son."

Thus her Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria first saw the light in Kensington
Palace on the 24th of May, 1819, one in a group of cousins, all, save
herself, born out of England.

The Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Wellington, and other officers of State
were in attendance on the occasion, though the probability of her
succession to the throne was then very doubtful. The Prince Regent had
already made overtures towards procuring a divorce from the Princess of
Wales. If he were to revive them, and prove successful, he might marry
again and have heirs. The Duchess of Clarence, who had just given birth to
an infant that had only survived a few hours, might yet be the joyful
mother of living children. The little Princess herself might be the
predecessor of a troop of princes of the Kent branch. Still, both at
Kensington and in the depths of rural Coburg, there was a little flutter,
not only of gladness, but of subdued expectation. The Duke of Kent, on
showing his baby to his friends, was wont to say, "Look at her well, for
she will be Queen of England." Her christening was therefore an event of
more than ordinary importance in the household. The ceremony took place a
month afterwards, on the 24th of June, and doubtless the good German
nurse, Madame Siebold, who was about to return to the Duchess of Kent's
old home to officiate on an equally interesting occasion in the family of
the Duchess's brother, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, carried
with her flaming accounts of the splendour of the ceremonial, as well as
pretty tales of the "dear little love" destined to mate with the coming
baby, whose big blue eyes were soon looking about in the lovely little
hunting-seat of Rosenau. The gold font was brought down from the Tower,
where for some time it had been out of request. The Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Bishop of London officiated, as they had done the year
before at the re-marriage of the Duke and Duchess. The godfathers were the
Prince Regent, present in person, and Alexander, Emperor of Russia, then
at the height of his popularity in England, represented by the Duke of
York. The godmothers were the Queen-dowager of Wurtemberg (the Princess
Royal), represented by Princess Augusta, and the Duchess-dowager of Coburg
(mother of the Duchess of Kent, and grandmother of both the Queen and the
Prince Consort), represented by the Duchess of Gloucester (Princess Mary).

It is said there had been a proposal to name the little princess Georgiana
also, after her grandfather and uncle, George III. and George, Prince
Regent; but the idea was dropped because the latter would not permit his
name to stand second on the list.

Among the other privileged guests at the christening was Prince Leopold,
destined to be the child's second father, one of her kindest and wisest
friends. It is not difficult to comprehend what the scene must have been
to the young man whose cup had been so full two years before, who was how
a widower and childless. We have his own reference to his feelings in a
letter to one of the late Princess Charlotte's friends. It had been hard
for him to be present, but he had felt it to be his duty, and he had made
the effort. This was a man who was always facing what was hard, always
struggling and overcoming in the name of right. The consequence was that,
even in his youth, all connected with him turned to him as to a natural
stay. We have a still better idea of what the victory cost him when we
read, in the "Life of the Prince Consort," it was not till a great
misfortune happened to her that Prince Leopold "had the courage to look
into the blooming face of his infant niece." With what manly pity and
tenderness he overcame his reluctance, and how he was rewarded, we all
know.

In December, 1819, the Duke and Duchess of Kent went for sea-air to
Woolbrook Cottage, Sidmouth, Devonshire.

The first baby is always of consequence in a household, but of how much
consequence this baby was may be gleaned by the circumstance that a
startling little incident concerning the child made sufficient mark to
survive and be registered by a future chronicler. A boy shooting sparrows
fired unwittingly so near the house that the shot shattered one of the
windows of the nursery, and passed close to the head of the child in the
nurse's arms. Precious baby-head, that was one day to wear, with honour, a
venerable crown, to be thus lightly threatened at the very outset! One can
fancy the terror of the nurse, the distress of the Duchess, the fright and
ire of the Duke, the horror and humiliation of the unhappy offender, with
the gradual cooling down into magnanimous amnesty--or at most dignified
rebuke, mollified by penitent tears into reassuring kindness, and just a
little quiver of half-affronted, half-nervous laughter.

But there was no more room for laughter at false alarms at Woolbrook
Cottage. Within a month the Duke was seized with the illness which ended
his life in a few days. The particulars are simple and touching. He had
taken a long walk with his equerry and great friend, Captain Conroy, and
came in heated, tired, and with his feet so wet that his companion
suggested the propriety of immediately changing his boots. But the baby of
whom he was so fond and proud came in his way. She was eight months old,
able to stretch out her little arms and laugh back to him. He stayed to
play with her. In the evening it was evident he had caught a chill; he was
hoarse, and showed symptoms of fever. The complaint settled at once on his
lungs, and ran its course with great rapidity. We hardly need to be told
that the Duchess was his devoted nurse, concealing her anxiety and grief
to minister to him in everything.

There is a pathetic little reference to the last illness of the Duke of
Kent in one of the Princess Hohenlohe's letters to the Queen. This elder
sister (Princess Feodora of Leiningen) was then a little girl of nine or
ten years of age, residing with her mother and stepfather. "Indeed, I well
remember that dreadful time at Sidmouth. I recollect praying on my knees
that God would not let your dear father die. I loved him dearly; he always
was so kind to me."

On the afternoon of the 22nd his case was hopeless, and it became a
question whether he had sufficient consciousness to sign his will. His old
friend, General Wetherall, was brought up to the bed. At the sound of the
familiar voice which had always been welcome to him, the sick man,
drifting away from all familiar sounds, raised himself, collected his
thoughts for the last time, and mentioned several places and people
intelligently. The poor Duke had never been negligent in doing what he saw
to be his duty. He had been forward in helping others, even when they were
not of his flesh and blood. He heard the will read over, and with a great
effort wrote the word "Edward," looking at every letter after he wrote it,
and asking anxiously if the signature was legible.

In this will, which left the Duchess guardian to the child, and appointed
General Wetherall and Captain Conroy trustees of his estate for the
benefit of his widow and daughter, it is noticeable that the name in each
case is given in the French version, "Victoire." Indeed so rare was the
term in England at this date, that it is probable the English equivalent
had scarcely been used before the christening of the Queen.

The Duke died on the following day, the 23rd of January, 1820. Only six
days later, on the 29th, good old King George expired at Windsor. The son
was cut down by violent disease while yet a man in middle life, just after
he had become the head of a little household full of domestic promise, and
with what might still have been a great public career opening out before
him. The father sank in what was, in his case, the merciful decay of age,
after he had been unable for ten years to fulfil the duties and charities
of life, and after surviving his faithful Queen a year. The language of
the official announcement of the physicians was unusually appropriate: "It
has pleased the Almighty to release his Majesty from all further
suffering." To complete the disasters of the royal family this month, the
new King, George IV., who had been labouring under a cold when his father
died, was seized immediately after his proclamation with dangerous
inflammation of the lungs, the illness that had proved fatal to the Duke
of Kent, and could not be present at his brother's or father's funerals;
in fact, he was in a precarious state for some days.

The Duke of Kent was buried, according to the custom of the time, by
torchlight, on the night of the 12th of February, at Windsor. As an
example of the difference which distance made then, it took nearly a
week's dreary travelling to convey the Duke's body from Woolbrook Cottage,
where it lay in State for some days, to Cumberland Lodge, from which the
funeral train walked to Windsor. The procession of mourning-coaches,
hearse, and carriages set out from Sidmouth on Monday morning, halting on
successive nights at Bridport, Blandford, Salisbury, and Basingstoke, the
coffin being deposited in the principal church of each town, under a
military guard, till on Friday night Cumberland Lodge was reached. The
same night a detachment of the Royal Horse Guards, every third man bearing
a flambeau, escorted a carriage containing the urn with the heart to St.
George's Chapel, where in the presence of the Dean, the officers of the
chapel, and several gentlemen appointed for the duty, urn and heart were
deposited in the niche in which the coffin was afterwards to be placed.
The body lay in State on the following day, that it might be seen by the
inhabitants of Windsor, his old military friends, and the multitude who
came down from London for the two mournful ceremonies. At eight o'clock at
night the final procession was formed, consisting of Poor Knights, pages,
pursuivants, heralds, the coronet on a black velvet cushion, the body
under pall and canopy, the supporters of the pall and canopy field-marshals
and generals, the chief mourner the Duke of York, the Dukes of Clarence,
Sussex, Gloucester, and Prince Leopold in long black cloaks, their trains
borne by gentlemen in attendance.

These torchlight funeral processions formed a singular remnant of
mediaeval pageantry. How the natural solemnity of night in itself
increased the awe and sadness of the scene to all simple minds, we can
well understand. Children far away from Windsor remembered after they were
grown men and women the vague terror with which they had listened in the
dim lamplight of their nurseries to the dismal tolling of the bell out in
the invisible church tower, which proclaimed that a royal duke was being
carried to his last resting-place. We can easily believe that thousands
would flock to look and listen, and be thrilled by the imposing spectacle.
The show must have been weirdly picturesque when wild wintry weather, as
in this case, added to the effect, "viewed for the distance of three
miles, through the spacious Long Walk, amidst a double row of lofty trees,
whilst at intervals the glittering of the flambeaux and the sound of
martial music were distinctly seen and heard."

The Duke's funeral only anticipated by a few days the still more
magnificent ceremonial with which a king was laid in the tomb.

But the real mourning was down in Devonshire, in the Sidmouth cottage. It
would be difficult to conceive more trying circumstances for a woman in
her station than those in which the young Duchess--she was but little over
thirty--found herself left. She had lost a kind husband, her child would
miss a doting father. She was a foreigner in a strange country. She had
entered into a divided family, with which her connection was in a measure
broken by the death of the Duke, while the bond that remained, however
precious to all, was too likely to prove a bone of contention. The Duke
had died poor. The Duchess had previously relinquished her German
jointure, and the English settlement on her was inadequate, especially if
it were to be cumbered with the discharge of any of her husband's personal
debts. It was not realised then that the Duchess of Kent, in marrying the
Duke and becoming his widow and the guardian of their child, had given up
not only independence, but what was affluence in her own country, with its
modest ways of living--even where princes were concerned--for the
mortification and worry of narrow means, the strain of a heavy
responsibility, the pain of much unjustifiable and undeserved interference,
misconception, and censure, until she lived to vindicate the good sense,
good feeling, and good taste with which she had always acted.

But the Duchess was not altogether desolate. Prince Leopold hurried to her
and supported her then, and on many another hard day, by brotherly
kindness, sympathy, and generous help. It was in his company that she came
back with her child to Kensington.

One element of the Coburg character has been described as the sound
judgment and quiet reasonableness associated with the temperate blood of
the race. Accordingly, we find the Duchess not only submitting with gentle
resignation to misfortune, but rousing herself, as her brother might have
done in her circumstances--as doubtless he urged her to do--to the active
discharge of the duties of her position. On the 23rd of February, before
the first month of her widowhood was well by, she received Viscount
Morpeth and Viscount Clive, the deputation bearing to her the address of
condolence from the House of Commons. She met them with the infant
Princess in her arms. The child was not only the sign that she fully
appreciated and acknowledged the nature of the tie which united her to the
country, it was the intimation of the close inseparable union with her
daughter which continued through all the years of the Queen's childhood
and youth, till the office of sovereign forced its holder into a separate
existence; till she found another fitting protector, when the generous,
ungrudging mother gave way to the worthy husband, who became the dutiful,
affectionate son of the Duchess's declining years.

Five months after these events the Duchess, at her own request, had an
interview with William Wilberforce, then living in the house at Kensington
Gore which was occupied later by the Countess of Blessington and Count
D'Orsay. "She received me," the good man wrote to Hannah More, "with her
fine, animated child on the floor by her side, with its playthings, of
which I soon became one. She was very civil, but, as she did not sit down,
I did not think it right to stop above a quarter of an hour; and there
being but a female attendant and a footman present, I could not well get
up any topic so as to carry on a continual discourse. _She apologised
for not speaking English well enough to talk it_; intimated a hope that
she might talk it better and longer with me at some future time. She spoke
of her situation, and her manner was quite delightful."

The sentence in italics opens our eyes to one of the difficulties of the
Duchess to which we might not otherwise have given much consideration. We
are apt to take it for granted that, though there is no royal road to
mathematics, the power of speaking foreign languages comes to royal
personages, if not by nature, at least by inheritance and by force of
circumstances. There is some truth in this when there is a foreign father
or mother; when royal babies are brought up, like Queen Victoria, to speak
several languages from infancy, and when constant contact with foreigners
confirms and maintains the useful faculty. Even when a prince or a
princess is destined from his or her early youth to share a foreign
throne, and is brought up with that end, a provision may be made for an
adopted tongue to become second nature. But the Duchess of Kent was not
brought up with any such prospect, and during her eleven years of married
life in Germany she must have had comparatively little occasion to
practise what English she knew; while, at the date of her coming to
England, she was beyond the age when one learns a new language with
facility. Any one of us who has experienced the fettered, perturbed,
bewildered condition which results from being reduced to express ourselves
at an important crisis in our history through a medium of speech with
which we are but imperfectly acquainted, will know how to estimate this
unthought-of obstacle in the Duchess of Kent's path, at the beginning of
her widowhood.

This was the year (1820) of the greatest eclipse of the sun which had been
seen for more than a century, when Venus and Mars were both visible, with
the naked eye, for a few minutes in the middle of the day. Whatever the
portents in the sky might mean, the signs on the earth were not
reassuring. When the Bourbon monarchy had seemed fairly restored in
France, all the world was shocked by the assassination of the Duc de Berri
at the door of the Opera-house in Paris. Three kingdoms which had but
recently been delivered from the clutch of the usurper were in revolt
against the constituted authorities--Portugal, Spain, and Naples. Of
these, the two former were on the brink of wars of succession, when the
royal uncles, Don Miguel and Don Carlos, fought against their royal
nieces, Donna Maria and Donna Isabella. At home the summer had been a sad
one to the royal family and the country. The ferment of discontent was
kept up by the very measures--executions and imprisonments--taken to
repress anarchy, and by the continuance of crushed trade, want of work,
and high prices. The Duchess of York died, making the third member of the
royal family dead since the new year; yet she, poor lady, was but a unit
in the sum, a single foreign princess who, however, kind she might have
been to the few who came near her, was nothing to the mass of the people.

The name of another foreign princess was in every man's mind and on every
man's tongue. However, there were many reasons for the anomaly. Caroline
of Brunswick was the Queen until she should be proved unworthy to bear the
title. Her quarrel with the King had long made her notorious. Though the
story reflected little credit on her, it was so utterly discreditable to
him that it raised up friends for her where they might have been least
expected. His unpopularity rendered her popular. Her name became the
rallying-cry for a great political faction. The mob, with its usual
headlong, unreasoning appropriation of a cause and a person, elevated her
into a heroine, cheered frantically, and was ready to commit any outbreak
in her honour.

After six years' absence from England Queen Caroline had come back on the
death of George III. to demand her rights. She had landed at Dover and
been welcomed by applauding crowds. She had been escorted through Kent by
uproarious partisans, who removed the horses from her carriage and dragged
her in triumph through the towns. London, in its middle and lower classes,
had poured out to meet her and come back in her train, till she was safely
lodged in South Audley Street, in the house of her champion, Alderman Wood.

The King had instructed his ministers to lay before the House of Lords a
bill of Pains and Penalties against the Queen which, if sustained, would
deprive her of every claim to share his rank and would annul the marriage.
The Queen was prepared with her defence, and furnished with two of the
ablest advocates in the kingdom, Mr. Brougham and Mr. Denman. In the
earlier stages of the proceedings she was present almost every day in the
House of Lords. She entered in her puce or black sarcenet pelisse and
black velvet hat, a large, not uncomely woman, a little over fifty, and
took the chair of State provided for her, the House rising to receive the
Queen whom it was trying. The trial, in its miserable details of gross
folly well-nigh incredible, lasted from July to November--four months of
burning excitement--when it collapsed from the smallness of the majority
(nine) that voted for the second reading of the bill. The animus of the
prosecution and the unworthy means taken to accomplish its purpose,
defeated the end in view. It is said that had it been otherwise the
country would have broken out into widespread insurrection.

The Queen's supporters, of all classes, sects, and shades, indulged in a
perfect frenzy of rejoicing. Festivals, illuminations, every token of
triumph for her and condemnation for him accompanied what was equivalent
to her acquittal. She went in something like State, with her queer, motley
household--Bohemian, English and Italians--and her great ally, Alderman
Wood, to offer up thanksgiving in St. Paul's, where, at the same time, she
found her name omitted from the Church service. She wore white velvet and
ermine, and was surrounded by thousands of shouting followers, as if she
had been the most discreet of queens and best of women. The poor
passionate, wayward nature, which after all had been cruelly dealt with,
was touched as well as elated.

On the very day after Queen Caroline's arrival in London in June, she had
dispatched Alderman Wood to Kensington, to condole with the Duchess of
Kent on her recent widowhood, and inquire after the health of the infant
princess. The message was innocent in itself, but alarming by implication;
for Queen Caroline was not a woman to be kept at a distance, or to
hesitate in expressing her sentiments if she fancied her overtures
slighted by the embarrassed Duchess. In the month of August Queen Caroline
had established herself at Brandenburg House--the Margravine of Anspach's
house, by the river at Hammersmith--near enough to Kensington Palace, to
judge from human nature, to disconcert and provoke a smile against the
smiler's will--for Caroline's extravagances would have disturbed the
gravity of a judge--in the womanly Princess at the head of the little
household soberly settled there. Never were princesses and women more
unlike than Caroline of Brunswick and Victoria of Coburg; But poor Queen
Caroline was not destined to remain long an awkward enigma--a queen and
yet no queen, an aunt and yet no aunt, a scandal and a torment in
everybody's path.

In the summer of the following year, when the country was drawn away and
dazzled by the magnificent ceremonial of the coronation of George IV., she
exercised her last disturbing influence. She demanded to be crowned along
with her husband; but her demand was refused by the Privy Council. She
appeared at the door of Westminster Abbey, but the way was barred to her.
A fortnight afterwards, when King George had gone to Ireland to arouse the
nation's loyalty, his wife had passed where Privy Council ushers and
yeomen of the guard were powerless, where the enmity of man had no voice
in the judgment of God. She had been attacked by severe illness, and in
the course of five days she died, in the middle of a wild storm of
thunder, wind, and rain. The night before, a boatful of Methodists had
rowed up the Thames, within sound of the open windows of her sick-room,
and sung hymns to comfort her in her extremity. The heart of a large part
of the nation still clung to her because of her misfortunes and the
insults heaped upon her. The late Queen's body was conveyed back to
Brunswick. The funeral passed through Kensington, escorted by a mighty
mob, in addition to companies of soldiers. The last were instructed to
conduct the _cortege_ by the outskirts of London to Harwich, where a
frigate and two sloops of war were waiting for the coffin. The mob were
resolute that their Queen's funeral should pass through the city. The
first struggle between the crowd and the military took place at the corner
of Church Street, Kensington. The strange, unseemly, contention was
renewed farther on more than once; but as bloodshed had been forbidden,
the people had their way, and the swaying mass surged in grim
determination straight towards the Strand and Temple Bar. The captain of
the frigate into whose keeping the coffin was committed in order to be
conveyed back to Brunswick had been, by a curious, sorrowful coincidence,
the midshipman who, "more than a quarter of a century before, handed the
rope to the royal bride whereby to help her on board the _Jupiter_,"
which was to bring her to England.

One can fancy that, when that sorry tragedy was ended, and its perpetual
noisy ebullitions had sunk into silence, a sense of relief stole over the
palace-home at Kensington.

Round the childhood and youth of sovereigns, especially popular
sovereigns, a growth of stories will gather like the myths which attend on
the infancy of a nation. Such stories or myths are chiefly valuable as
showing the later tendency of the individual or people, the character and
history of the monarch or of the subjects, in accordance with which, in
reversal of the adage that makes the child father to the man, the man is,
in a new sense, father to the child, by stamping on his infancy and nonage
traits borrowed from his mature years. Mingled with the species of
legendary lore attaching to every generation, there is a foundation more
or less of authentic annals. It is as affording an example of this human
patchwork of fancy and fact, and as illustrating the impression deeply
engraved on the popular mind, that the following incidents of the Queen's
childhood and youth are given.

First, the people have loved to dwell on the close union between mother
and child. The Duchess nursed her baby--would see it washed and dressed.
As soon as the little creature could sit alone, her small table was placed
by her mother's at meals, though the child was only allowed the food fit
for her years. The Princess slept in her mother's room all through her
childhood and girlhood. In the entries in the Queen's diary at the time of
the Duchess of Kent's death, her Majesty refers to an old repeater
striking every quarter of an hour in the sick-room on the last night of
the Duchess's life--"a large watch in a tortoiseshell case, which had
belonged to my poor father, the sound of which brought back to me all the
recollections of my childhood, for I had always used to hear it at night,
but had not heard it for now twenty-three years."

When the Princess was a little older, and lessons and play alternated with
each other, she was taught to attend to the thing in hand, and finish what
she had begun, both in her studies and games. One day she was amusing
herself making a little haycock when some other mimic occupation caught
her volatile fancy, and she flung down her small rake ready to rush off to
the fresh attraction. "No, no, Princess; you must always complete what you
have commenced," said her governess, and the small haymaker had to
conclude her haymaking before she was at liberty to follow another
pursuit.

From the Princess's fifth year Dr. Davys, afterwards Bishop of
Peterborough, was her tutor. When it became clear that the little girl
would, if she lived, be Queen of England, a prelate high in the Church was
proposed to the Duchess of Kent as the successor of Dr. Davys in his
office. But the Duchess, with the mild firmness and conscientious fidelity
which ruled her conduct, declared that as she was perfectly satisfied with
the tutor who had originally been appointed (when the appointment was less
calculated to offer temptations to personal ambition and political
intrigue), she did not see that any change was advisable. If a clergyman
of higher rank was necessary, there was room for the promotion of Dr.
Davys. Accordingly he was named Dean of Chester.

The Baroness Lehzen was another of the Queen's earliest guardians who
remained at her post throughout her Majesty's youth. Louise Lehzen,
daughter of a Hanoverian clergyman, came to England as governess to
Princess Feodora Leiningen and remained as governess to Princess Victoria,
entering on her duties in 1824. In 1827 she was raised to the rank of a
Hanoverian Baroness, by George IV., at the request of Princess Sophia.
From that time Baroness Lehzen acted also as lady in attendance. On her
death, so late as 1870, her old pupil recorded of her, in a passage in the
Queen's journal, which is given in the "Life of the Prince Consort," "My
dearest, kindest friend, old Lehzen, expired on the 9th quite gently and
peaceably.... She knew me from six months old, and from my fifth to my
eighteenth year devoted all her care and energies to me with the most
wonderful abnegation of self, never even taking one day's holiday. I
adored, though I was greatly in awe of her. She really seemed to have no
thought but for me.... She was in her eighty-seventh year." This constancy
and permanency in the family relations were in themselves inestimable
boons to the child, who thus grew up in an atmosphere of familiar
affection and unshaken trust, for the absence of which nothing in the
world could have compensated. Another lady of higher rank was of necessity
appointed governess to the Queen in 1831, when she became next heir to the
throne. This lady, the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, appears also as
the Queen's friend in after life.

The late Bishop Wilberforce was told by Dr. Davys an interesting anecdote
of his former pupil. "The Queen always had from my first knowing her a
most striking regard to truth. I remember when I had been teaching her one
day, she was very impatient for the lesson to be over--once or twice
rather refractory. The Duchess of Kent came in, and asked how she had
behaved. Lehzen said, 'Oh, once she was rather troublesome.' The Princess
touched her and said, 'No, Lehzen, twice, don't you remember?' The Duchess
of Kent, too, was a woman of great truth."

It had been judged meet that the future Queen should not be made aware of
her coming greatness, which, for that matter, continued doubtful in her
earlier years. She was to grow up free from the impending care and
responsibility, happy and healthful in her unconscious girlhood--above
all, unassailed by the pernicious attempts to bespeak her favour, the
crafty flattery, the undermining insinuations which have proved the bane
of the youth of so many sovereigns. In order to preserve this reticence,
unslumbering care and many precautions were absolutely necessary. It is
said the Princess was constantly under the eye either of the Duchess of
Kent or the Baroness Lehzen. The guard proved sufficient; yet it was
difficult to evade the lively intelligence of an observant sensible child.

"Why do all the gentlemen take off their hats to me and not to my sister
Feodora?" the little girl is said to have asked wonderingly on her return
from a drive in the park, referring to her elder half-sister, who became
Princess of Hohenlohe, between whom and the questioner there always
existed the strong sweet affection of true sisters. Perhaps the little
lady felt indignant as well as mystified at the strange preference thus
given to her, in spite of her sister's superiority in age and wisdom. We
do not know what reply was made to this puzzling inquiry, though it would
have been easy enough to say that the little Princess was the daughter of
an English royal Duke, therefore an English Princess, and the big Princess
was German on both sides of the house, while these were English gentlemen
who had saluted their young countrywoman. We all know from the best
authority that Sir Walter Scott was wrong when he fancied some bird of the
air must have conveyed the important secret to the little fair-haired
maiden to whom he was presented in 1828. The mystery was not disclosed for
years to come.

The child, though brought up in retirement, was by no means secluded from
observation, or deprived of the change and variety so advantageous to
human growth and development. From her babyhood in the sad visit to
Sidmouth in 1820, and from 1821, when she was at that pretentious
combination of fantasticalness and gorgeousness, the Pavilion, Brighton,
she was carried every year, like any other well-cared-for child, either to
the seaside or to some other invigorating region, so that she became
betimes acquainted with different aspects of sea and shore in her island.
Ramsgate was a favourite resort of the Duchess's. The little Thanet
watering-place, with its white chalk cliffs, its inland basin of a
harbour, its upper and lower town, connected by "Jacob's Ladder," its pure
air and sparkling water, with only a tiny fringe of bathing-machines, was
in its blooming time of fresh rural peace and beauty when it was the
cradle by the sea of the little Princess.

When she was five she was at Claremont, making music and motion in the
quiet house with her gleeful laughter and pattering feet, so happy in
being with her uncle that she could look back on this visit as the
brightest of her early holidays. "This place," the Queen wrote to the King
of the Belgians long afterwards, "has a peculiar charm for us both, and to
me it brings back recollections of the happiest days of my otherwise dull
childhood,--when I experienced such kindness from you, dearest uncle,
kindness which has ever since continued.... Victoria plays with my old
bricks, and I see her running and jumping in the flower-garden, as
_old_, though I feel still _little_, Victoria of former days
used to do." In the autumn of 1825 the Queen's grandmother, the Dowager
Duchess of Coburg, visited England, and the whole family were together at
Claremont.

In 1826, "the warm summer," when the Princess was seven years of age, she
was invited to Windsor to see another uncle, George IV. That was a more
formidable ordeal, but her innocent frank brightness carried her through
it successfully. It is not easy for many men to contemplate with
satisfaction their heirs, when those heirs are no offspring of theirs. It
must have been doubly difficult for the King to welcome the little girl
who had replaced his daughter, the child of his wronged brother and of a
Princess whom King George persistently slighted and deprived of her due.
But we are told his Majesty was delighted with his little niece's
liveliness and intelligence.

In the following year, 1827, the Duke of York died, and the Princess, was
a step nearer to the throne, but she did not know it. So far from being
reared in an atmosphere of self-indulgence, the invaluable lesson was
early taught to her that if she were to be honourable and independent in
any rank, she must not buy what she could not pay for; if she were to be a
good woman she must learn to deny herself. An incident in illustration,
which made a small stir in its locality at the time, is often quoted. The
Duchess and her daughter were at Tunbridge Wells, dwelling in the
neighbourhood of Sir Philip Sidney's Penshurst, retracing the vanished
glories of the Pantiles, and conferring on the old pump-woman the
never-to-be-forgotten honour of being permitted to present a glass of
water from the marble basin to the Princess. The little girl made
purchases at the bazaar, buying presents, like any other young visitor,
for her absent friends, when she found her money all spent, and at the
same time saw a box which would suit an absent cousin. "The shop-people of
course placed the box with the other purchases, but the little lady's
governess admonished them by saying, 'No. You see the Princess has not got
the money; therefore, of course, she cannot buy the box.'" This being
perceived, the next offer was to lay by the box till it could be
purchased, and the answer was, "Oh, well, if you will be so good as to do
that." On quarter-day, before seven in the morning, the Princess appeared
on her donkey to claim her purchase.

In the reverence, peace, and love of her pure, refined, if saddened home,
everything went well with Princess Victoria, of whom we can only tell that
we know the old brick palace where she dwelt, the playground that was
hers, the walks she must have taken. We have sat in the later chapel where
she said her prayers, a little consecrated room with high pews shutting in
the worshippers, a royal gallery, open this time, and an elderly gentleman
speaking with a measured, melodious voice. We can guess with tolerable
certainty what was the Princess's child-world of books, though from the
circumstance that in the light of the future she was made to learn more
than was usual then for English girls of the highest rank, she had less
time than her companions for reading books which were not study, but the
most charming blending of instruction and amusement. That was still the
age of Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth. "Evenings at Home," "Harry and
Lucy," and "Frank and Rosamond," were in every well-conducted school-room.
All little girls read with prickings of tender consciences about the lady
with the bent bonnet and the scar on her hand, and came under the
fascination of the "Purple Jar." A few years later, Harriet Martineau's
bristling independence did not prevent her from feeling gratified by the
persuasion that the young Princess was reading through her tales on
political economy, and that Princess Victoria's favourite character was
Ella of the far north.

In the Princess's Roman history one day she came to the passage where the
noble matron, Cornelia, in answer to a question as to her precious things,
pointed to her sons, and declared, "These are my jewels." "Why," cried the
ready-witted little pupil, with a twinkle in her blue eyes, "they must
have been cornelians."

When the Princess's lessons took the form of later English history, she
was on the very spot for the study. Did her teacher tell her, we wonder,
the pretty story of "Bucky," who interrupted grave, saturnine King William
at his statescraft in one of yonder rooms? How the small dauntless
applicant wiled his father's master, great Louis's rival, into playing at
horses in the corridor? Or that sadder story of another less fortunate
boy, poor heavy-headed William of Gloucester? Tutors crammed and doctors
shook him up, with the best intentions, in vain. In his happier moments he
drilled his regiment of little soldiers on that Palace Green before his
uncle, King William.

Was the childish passion for exploring old garrets and lumber-rooms
excited in this royal little woman by the narrative of the wonderful
discovery which Queen Caroline had made in a forgotten bureau in this very
palace? Did the little Princess roam about too, in her privileged moments,
with a grand vision of finding more and greater art-treasures, other
drawings by Holbein or Vandyke, fresh cartoons by Raphael?

All the more valuable paintings had been removed long ago to Windsor, but
many curious pictures still remained on the walls of presence chambers and
galleries, kings' and queens' great dining-rooms and drawing-rooms,
staircases and closets. Did the pictures serve as illustrations to the
history lessons? Was the inspection made the recreation of rainy days,
when the great suites of State-rooms in which Courts were no longer held
or banquets celebrated, but which still echoed with the remembered tread
of kings' and courtiers' feet, must have appeared doubly deserted and
forlorn?

What was known as the King's Great Drawing-room was not far from the
Duchess of Kent's rooms, and was, in fact, put at her disposal in its
dismantled, ghostly condition. Among its pictures--freely attributed to
many schools and masters--including several battle-pieces and many
portraits, there were three representations of English palaces: old
Greenwich, where Elizabeth was born; old Hampton, dear to William and
Mary; and Windsor, the Windsor of George III. and Queen Charlotte, the
Princess's grandfather and grandmother. In the next room, amidst classic
and scriptural subjects, and endless examples of "ladies with ruffs,"
"heads in turbans," &c., there were occasionally family portraits--the old
King and Queen more than once; William, Duke of Gloucester; the Queen of
Wurtemberg as the girl-Princess Royal, with a dog. (She died in Wurtemberg
about this time, 1828. She had quitted England on her marriage in 1797,
and in the thirty-one years of her married life only once came back, as an
aging and ailing woman. She proved a good wife and stepmother.) A youthful
family group of an earlier generation was sure to attract a child--George
III. and his brother, Edward, Duke of York, when young, shooting at a
target, the Duke of Gloucester in petticoats, Princess Augusta (Duchess of
Brunswick, and mother of Caroline, Princess of Wales) nursing the Duke of
Cumberland, and Princess Louisa sitting in a chaise drawn by a favourite
dog, the scene in Kew Gardens, painted in 1746. Queen Elizabeth was there
as a child aged seven, A.D. 1540--three-quarters, with a feather-fan in
her hand. Did the guide of the little unconscious Princess pause
inadvertently, with a little catch of the breath, by words arrested on the
tip of the tongue, before that picture? And was he or she inevitably
arrested again before another picture of Queen Elizabeth in her prime,
returning from her palace, wearing her crown and holding the sceptre and
the globe; Juno, Pallas, and Venus flying before her, Juno dropping her
sceptre, Venus her roses, and the little boy Cupid flinging away his bow
and arrows, and clinging in discomfiture to his mother because good Queen
Bess had conquered all the three in power, wisdom, and beauty? We know the
Princess must have loved to look at the pictures. More curious than
beautiful as they were, they may have been sufficient to foster in her
that love of art which has been the delight of the Queen's maturer years.

English princesses, even though they were not queens in perspective, were
not so plentiful in Queen Victoria's young days as to leave any doubt of
their hands and hearts proving in great request when the proper time came.
Therefore there was no necessity to hold before the little girl, as an
incentive to good penmanship, the example of her excellent grandmother,
Queen Charlotte, who wrote so fair a letter, expressed with such
correctness and judiciousness, at the early age of fifteen, that when the
said letter fell, by an extraordinary train of circumstances, into the
hands of young King George, he determined there and then to make that
painstaking and sensible Princess, and no other, a happy wife and great
Queen. There was no strict need for the story, and yet as a gentle
stimulant it may have been administered.

Queen Victoria was educated, as far as possible, in the simple habits and
familiarity with nature which belongs to the best and happiest training of
any child, whatever her rank. There is a pleasant picture in Knight's
"Passages of a Working Life": "I delighted to walk in Kensington Gardens
in the early summer, on my way to town.... In such a season, when the sun
was scarcely high enough to have dried up the dews of Kensington's green
alleys, as I passed along the broad central walk I saw a group on the lawn
before the palace, which, to my mind, was a vision of exquisite
loveliness. The Duchess of Kent and her daughter, whose years then
numbered nine, are breakfasting in the open air, a single page attending
on them at a respectful distance, the mother looking on with eyes of love,
while the fair, soft, English face is bright with smiles. The world of
fashion is not yet astir. Clerks and mechanics passing onwards to their
occupations are few, and they exhibit nothing of vulgar curiosity."

We have another charming description, by Leigh Hunt, of a glimpse which he
had of Princess Victoria in these gardens: "We remember well the peculiar
kind of personal pleasure which it gave us to see the future Queen, the
first time we ever did see her, coming up a cross-path from the Bayswater
Gate, with a girl of her own age by her side, whose hand she was holding
as if she loved her. It brought to our minds the warmth of our own
juvenile friendships, and made us fancy that she loved everything else
that we had loved in like measure--books, trees, verses, Arabian tales,
and the good mother who had helped to make her so affectionate. A
magnificent footman in scarlet came behind her, with the splendidest pair
of calves, in white stockings, that we ever beheld. He looked somehow like
a gigantic fairy, personating for his little lady's sake the grandest kind
of footman he could think of; and his calves he seemed to have made out of
a couple of the biggest chaise-lamps in the possession of the godmother of
Cinderella. With or without her big footman, the little Princess could
have rambled safely in the grounds which her predecessors had made for
her, could have fed the ducks which swam in the round pond before her
palace windows, could have drunk from the curious little mineral well,
where, in Miss Thackeray's 'Old Kensington,' Frank Raban met Dolly
Vanburgh, or peeped out of the little side gate where the same Dolly came
face to face with the culprits George and Rhoda. The future owner of all
could have easily strayed down the alleys among the Dutch elms which King
William brought, perhaps saplings, from the Boomjees, as far as the oak
that tradition says King Charles set in the form of an acorn taken from
his leafy refuge at Boscobel."

The Duke of Kent had brought an old soldier-servant, called Stillman, and
established him, with his wife and family, in a cottage in one of the
Kensington lanes. It is said the Duke had recommended this former retainer
to the care of the Duchess, and that she and her daughter were in the
habit of visiting and caring for the family, in which there were a sickly
little boy and girl.

An event happened in 1828 to the household in Kensington Palace which was
of importance to all. It was a joyful event, and the preparations for the
royal wedding, with the gala in which the preliminaries culminated, must
have formed an era in the quiet young life into which a startling
announcement and its fulfilment had broken, filling the hours of the short
winter days with wonder, admiration, and interest.

Yet all the pleasant stir and excitement; the new member of the family
prominent for a brief space; the gifts, the trousseau, the wedding-cake,
the wedding guests, were but the deceptive herald of change and loss to
the family, whose members were so few that each became deeply precious.
The closely united circle was to be broken, and a dear face permanently
withdrawn from the group. The Duchess of Kent's elder daughter, Princess
Victoria's only sister, was about to marry. It was the most natural and
the happiest course, above all when the Princess Feodora wedded
worthily--how worthily let the subsequent testimony of the Queen and the
Prince Consort prove. It was given at the time of the Prince of
Hohenlohe's death, thirty-two years afterwards, in 1860.

The Queen wrote to her own and her sister's uncle, the King of the
Belgians, in reference to the Prince of Hohenlohe: "A better, more
thoroughly straightforward, upright, and excellent man, with a more
unblemished character, or a more really devoted and faithful husband,
never existed."

The Prince Consort's opinion of his brother-in-law is to be found in a
letter to the Princess William of Prussia: "Poor Ernest Hohenlohe is a
great loss. Though he was not a man of great powers of mind, capable of
taking comprehensive views of the world, still he was a great character
--that is to say, a thoroughly good, noble, spotless, and honourable man,
which in these days forms a better title to be recognised as great than do
craftiness, Machiavellism, and grasping ambition."

At the time of his marriage the Prince of Hohenlohe was in the prime of
manhood, thirty-two years of age.

But the marriage meant the Princess Feodora's return to Germany and her
separation from the other members of her family, with the exception of her
brother, brought up in his own country. The bride, whom we hear of
afterwards as a true and tender woman, was then a sweet maiden of twenty,
whose absence must have made a great blank to her mother and sister.
Happily for the latter, she was too young to realise in the agreeable
excitement of the moment what a deprivation remained in store for her.
There were eleven years between the sisters. This was enough difference to
mingle a motherly, protecting element with the elder sister's pride and
fondness, and to lead the younger, whose fortunes were so much higher, but
who was unaware of the fact, to look up with affectionate faith and trust
to the grown-up companion, in one sense on a level with the child, in
another with so much more knowledge and independence.

It was a German marriage, both bride and bridegroom being German, though
the bride had been nine years--the difference between a child and a
woman--in England, and though the event occurred in an English household.
Whether the myrtle was worn for the orange-blossoms, or any of the other
pretty German wedding customs imported, we cannot tell. Anyhow, the
ordinary peaceful simplicity of the palace was replaced by much bustle and
grandeur on that February morning, the modest forerunner of another
February morning in another palace, when a young Queen plighted her troth.

The royal family in England, with two exceptions, were at Kensington Palace
to do honour to the marriage. The absent members were the King and Princess
Augusta--the latter of whom was at Brighton. The company arrived soon after
two o'clock, and consisted of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, the Duke of
Sussex, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Princess Sophia, the
Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, and Prince Leopold.

At three o'clock the party walked in procession to the great saloon
adjoining the vestibule, in which a temporary altar had been fitted up. The
bride was given away by the Duke of Clarence. The ceremony was performed in
the simple Lutheran fashion by a simple Lutheran pastor, Dr. Kuper, "the
chaplain of the Royal German Chapel."

Then came the parting, and the quiet palace-home was stiller and shadier
than ever, when the gracious maidenly presence had gone, when the opening
rose was plucked from the parent stem, and only the bud left.

In 1830 George IV. died, and William, Duke of Clarence, succeeded to the
throne as King William IV. That summer was the last of the Princess's
ignorance of her prospects; until then not even the shadow of a throne had
been projected across the sunshiny path of the happy girl of eleven. She
was with her mother in one of the fairest scenes in England--Malvern. The
little town with its old Priory among the Worcester hills, looks down on
the plain of Worcester, the field of a great English battle.

A dim recollection of the Duchess and the Princess is still preserved at
Malvern--how pleasant and kind they were to all, how good to the poor; how
the future Queen rode on a donkey like any other young girl at
Malvern--like poor Marie Antoinette in the forest glades of Compiegne and
Fontainebleau half a century earlier, when she was only four years older,
although already Dauphiness of France. The shadowy records do not tell us
much more; we are left to form our own conclusions whether the Queen
anticipated her later ascents of Scotch and Swiss mountains by juvenile
scrambles amongst the Worcester hills; whether she stood on the top of the
Worcester or Hereford Beacon; or whether these were considered too
dangerous and masculine exploits for a princess of tender years, growing up
to inherit a throne? She could hardly fail to enter the Wytche, the strange
natural gap between Worcestershire and Herefordshire, by which, at one
step, the wayfarer leaves wooded England behind, and stands face to face
with a pastoral corner of Wales; or to drive along the mile-long common of
Barnard's Green, with the geese, and the hay-stacks, and the little
cottages on either side, and always in front the steep ridge of hills with
the grey Priory where Piers Plowman saw his vision, nestling at their feet;
or to pull the heather and the wild strawberries in Cowleigh Park, from
which every vestige of its great house has departed. She might have been a
privileged visitor at Madresfield, where some say Charles II. slept the
night before the battle of Worcester, and where there is a relic that would
better become Kensington, in a quilt which Queen Anne and Duchess Sarah
embroidered together in silks in the days of their fast friendship.

As it was part of the Princess's good education to be enlightened, as far
as possible, with regard to the how and why of arts and manufactures, we
make no question she was carried to Worcester, not only to see the
cathedral, but to have the potteries exhibited to her. There was a great
deal for the ingenuous mind of a royal pupil to see, learn, and enjoy in
Worcester and Warwickshire--for she was also at Guy's Cliff and Kenilworth.

It had become clear to the world without that the succession rested with
the Duke of Kent's daughter. Long before, the Duchess of Clarence had
written to her sister-in-law in a tender, generous struggle with her
sorrow: "My children are dead, but yours lives, and she is mine too." As
the direct heir to the crown, the Princess Victoria became a person of
great importance, a source of serious consideration alike to the Government
and to her future subjects. The result, in 1830, was a well-deserved if
somewhat long-delayed testimony to the merits of the Duchess of Kent, which
must have given honest satisfaction not only at Kensington, but at
Claremont--to whose master the Belgian Revolution was opening up the
prospect of a kingdom more stable than that of Greece, for which Prince
Leopold had been mentioned. Away in the Duchess's native Coburg, too, the
congratulations were sincere and hearty.

The English Parliament had not only formally recognised the Princess as the
next heir and increased the Duchess's income to ten thousand a year, so
relieving her from some of her difficulties; it had, with express and
flattering reference to the admirable manner in which she had until then
discharged the trust that her husband had confided to her, appointed her
Regent in the event of King William's death while the Princess was still a
minor. In this appointment the Duchess was preferred to the Duke of
Cumberland. He had become the next royal Duke in the order of descent, but
had failed to inspire confidence in his countrymen. In fact he was in
England the most uniformly and universally unpopular of all George III.'s
sons. There was even a wild rumour that he was seeking, against right and
reason, to form a party which should attempt to revive the Salic law and
aim at setting aside the Princess and placing Prince George of Cumberland
on the throne of England as well as on that of Hanover.

The Princess had reached the age of twelve, and it was judged advisable,
after her position had been thus acknowledged, that she herself should be
made acquainted with it. The story--the authenticity of which is
established beyond question--is preserved in a letter from the Queen's
former governess, Baroness Lehzen, which her Majesty has, given to the
world.

"I ask your Majesty's leave to cite some remarkable words of your Majesty
when only twelve years old, while the Regency Bill was in progress. 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 splendour, 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 now why you
urged me so much to learn even Latin. My aunts Augusta and Mary never did;
but you told me 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.' I then said, 'But your aunt Adelaide is still young, and may have
children, and of course they would ascend the throne after their father,
William IV., and not you, Princess.' The Princess answered, 'And if it was
so, I should never feel disappointed, for I know by the love aunt Adelaide
bears me how fond she is of children.'"

No words can illustrate better what is striking and touching in this
episode than those with which Mrs. Oliphant refers to it in her sketch of
the Queen. "It is seldom that an early scene like this stands out so
distinctly in the early story even of a life destined to greatness. The
hush of awe upon the child; the childish application of this great secret
to the abstruse study of Latin, which was not required from the others; the
immediate resolution, so simple, yet containing all the wisest sage could
have counselled, or the greatest hero vowed,' I will be good,' makes a
perfect little picture. It is the clearest appearance of the future Queen
in her own person that we get through the soft obscurity of those childish
years." The Duchess of Kent remained far from a rich woman for her station,
and the young Princess had been sooner told of her mother's straitened
income than of the great inheritance in store for herself. She continued to
be brought up in unassuming, inexpensive habits.

In February, 1831, when Princess Victoria was twelve, she made her first
appearance in state at "the most magnificent Drawing-room which, had been
seen since that which had taken place on the presentation of Princess
Charlotte of Wales upon the occasion of her marriage." The Drawing-room was
held by Queen Adelaide, and it was to do honour to the new Queen no less
than to commemorate the approaching completion of the Princess's twelfth
year that the heiress to the throne was present in a prominent position, an
object of the greatest interest to the splendid company. She came along
with the Duchess her mother, attended by an appropriate suite, including
the Duchess of Northumberland, Lady Charlotte St. Maur, Lady Catherine
Parkinson, the Hon. Mrs. Cust, the Baroness Lehzen, and the Princess's
father's old friends, General Wetherall and Captain (now Sir John) Conroy,
with his wife, Lady Conroy. The Princess's dress was made, as the Queen's
often was afterwards, entirely of articles manufactured in the United
Kingdom. She wore a frock of English blonde, "simple, modest, and
becoming." She stood on the left of her Majesty on the throne, and
"contemplated all that passed with much dignity, but with evident
interest." We are further told, what we can well believe, that she excited
general admiration as well as interest. We can without difficulty call up
before us the girlish figure in its pure, white dress, the soft, open face,
the fair hair, the candid blue eyes, the frank lips slightly apart, showing
the white pearly teeth. The intelligent observation, the remarkable absence
of self-consciousness and consequent power of self-control and of
thought for others, which struck all who approached her in the great crisis
of her history six years afterwards, were already conspicuous in the young
girl. No doubt it was for her advantage, in consideration of what lay
before her, that while brought up in wholesome privacy, she was at the same
time inured, so far, to appear in public, to bear the brunt of many
eyes--some critical, though for the most part kind--touched by her youth
and innocence, by the circumstance that she was fatherless, and by the
crown she must one day wear. She had to learn to conduct herself with the
mingled self-respect and ease which became her station. Impulsiveness,
shyness, nervousness, are more serious defects in kings and queens than in
ordinary mortals. To use a homely phrase, "to have all their wits about
them" is very necessary in their case. If in addition they can have all
their hearts--hearts warm and considerate, nobly mindful of their own
obligations and of the claims of others--so much the better for the
sovereigns and for all who come under their influence. A certain amount of
familiarity with being the observed of all observers, with treading alone a
conspicuous path demanding great circumspection, was wanted beforehand, in
order that the young head might remain steady in the time of sudden,
tremendous elevation.

Nevertheless, the Princess was not present at the coronation of King
William and Queen Adelaide, and her absence, as the heir-presumptive to the
throne, caused much remark and speculation, and gave rise to not a few
newspaper paragraphs. Various causes were assigned for the singular
omission. _The Times_ openly accused the Duchess of Kent of proving
the obstacle. Other newspapers followed suit, asserting that the grounds
for the Duchess's refusal were to be found in the circumstance that in the
coronation procession, marshalled by Lord A. Fitzclarence, the place
appointed for the Princess Victoria, instead of being next to the King and
Queen, according to her right, was after the remaining members of the royal
family. Conflicting authorities declared that the Prime Minister, Earl
Grey, for some occult reason, opposed the Princess's receiving an
invitation to be present at a ceremony which had so much interest for her;
or that the Duchess of Northumberland, the governess of the Princess, took
the same extraordinary course from political motives. Finally, _The
Globe_ gave, on authority, an explanation that had been offered all
along in the midst of more sensational rumours. The Princess's health was
rather delicate, and the Duchess of Kent had, on that account, got the
King's sanction to her daughter's not being exposed to unusual excitement
and fatigue. The statement on authority was unanswerable, but while it
stilled one cause of apprehension it awakened another. After the untimely
death of Princess Charlotte, the nation was particularly sensitive with
regard to the health of the heir to the crown. Whispers began to spread
abroad, happily without much foundation, of pale cheeks, and a constitution
unfit for the burden which was to be laid upon it.



CHAPTER III.
YOUTH.


In the month of August, 1831, the Princess went with her mother to profit
by the soft, sweet breezes of the Isle of Wight. The Duchess and her
daughter occupied Norris Castle for three months, and the ladies of the
family were often on the shore watching the white sails and chatting with
the sailors. Carisbrooke and King Charles the Martyr were brought more
vividly home to his descendant, with the pathetic little tale of the
girl-Princess Elizabeth. We do not know whether the Queen then learnt to
feel a special love for the fair little island with which she has long been
familiar, but of this we are certain, that she could then have had little
idea that her chief home would be within its bounds. Even in 1831 transport
and communication by land and water continued a tedious and troublesome
business. However, the visit to the Isle of Wight was repeated in 1833.
Perhaps to dissipate the gossip and calm the little irritation which had
been created by the Princess's absence from the coronation, she made her
appearance twice in public, on the completion of her thirteenth year, in
1832. That was a year in which there was much call for oil to be cast on
the troubled waters: never since 1819, the date of the Queen's birth had
there been greater restlessness and turmoil throughout the country. For
some time public feeling had been kept at the boiling-point by the question
of the Reform Bill--groaned over by some as the first step to democracy and
destruction; eagerly hailed by others as a new dawn of freedom, peace, and
prosperity. The delay in passing the Bill had rendered the King unpopular,
and brought unmerited blame on Queen Adelaide, for having gone beyond her
prerogative in lending herself to overthrow the King's Whig principles. The
ferment had converted the old enthusiastic homage to the Iron Duke as a
soldier into fierce detestation of him as a statesman. The carrying of the
measure on which the people had set their hearts did not immediately allay
the tempest--a disappointing result, which was inevitable when the
universal panacea failed to work at once like a charm in relieving all the
woes in the kingdom. Men were not only rude, and spoke their minds, the
ringleaders broke out again into riots, the most formidable and alarming of
which were those in Bristol, that left a deep impression on more than one
chance spectator who witnessed them. But the girl Princess--praised for her
proficiency in Horace and Virgil, and her progress in mathematics--could
only hear far off the mutterings of the storm that was passing; and King
William and Queen Adelaide sought to put aside what was perplexing and
harassing them; and tried to forget that when they had shown themselves to
their people lately they had been met--here with indifference--and there
with hootings. The times were waxing more and more evil, as it seemed, to
uneasy, vexed wearers of crowns, unlike those in which old King George and
Queen Charlotte had been received with fervent acclamation wherever they
went, whatever wars were being waged or taxes imposed. The manners of the
Commons were not improving with the extension of their rights. But the King
and Queen would do their duty, which was far from disagreeable to them, in
paying proper respect to their niece and successor. Accordingly their
Majesties gave a ball on the Princess's thirteenth birthday, 24th May,
1832, at which the heroine of the day figured; and four days later, on the
28th of May, she was present for the second time at a Drawing-room.

All the same, it is an open secret that William, living, for the most part,
in that noblest palace of Windsor, considered the Princess led too retired
a life, so far as not appearing often enough at his Court was concerned,
and that he complained of her absence and resented it as a slight to
himself. It is an equally well-established fact that, in spite of the
King's kindness of heart and Queen Adelaide's goodness, King William's
Court was not in all respects a desirable place for a Princess to grow up
in, in addition to the objection that any Court in itself formed an
unsuitable schoolroom for a young girl.

It is doubtful, since even the most magnanimous men have jealous instincts,
whether the King's displeasure on one point would be appeased by what was
otherwise a very natural and judicious step taken by the Duchess of Kent
this year. She made an autumn tour with her daughter through several
counties of England and Wales, in the course of which the royal mother and
daughter paid a succession of visits to seats of different noblemen, taking
Oxford on the way. If there was a place in England which deserved the
notice of its future Queen, it was one of the two great universities--the
cradles of learning, and, in the case of "the most loyal city of Oxford,"
the bulwark of the throne. The party proceeded early in October through
the beautiful scenery of North Wales--the Princess's first experience of
mountains--to Eaton Hall, the home of the Grosvenor family. From Eaton the
travellers drove to the ancient city of Chester, with its quaint arcades
and double streets, its God's Providence House and its cathedral. At
Chester the Princess named the new bridge which was opened on the occasion.
By the wise moderation and self-repression of those around her, the name
bestowed was not the "Victoria," but simply the "Grosvenor Bridge."

From Eaton the Princess was taken to Chatsworth, the magnificent seat of
the Cavendishes. She stayed long enough to see and hear something of
romantic Derbyshire. She visited Hardwick, associated with Building Bess,
whose granddaughter, the unfortunate "Lady Arbell," had been a remote
cousin of this happy young Princess, and she went, like everybody else, to
Matlock. At Belper the party, in diligent search after all legitimate
knowledge, examined the great cotton-mills of the Messrs. Strutt, and the
senior partner had the honour of showing to her Royal Highness, by means of
a model, how cotton was spun.

From Chatsworth the Duchess and her daughter repaired to Alton Abbey, where
the "Talbot tykes" still kept watch and ward; thence to Shugborough, the
seat of the Earl of Lichfield, which enabled the visitors to see another
fine cathedral and to breathe the air which is full of "the great Dr.
Johnson."

At each of the towns the strangers were met by addresses--of course made to
the Duchess and replied to by her. How original these formal compliments
must have sounded to Princess Victoria! On the 27th of October their Royal
Highnesses were at Pitchford Hall, the residence of the Earl of Liverpool,
from which they visited Shrewsbury--another Chester--with a word of its own
for the old fateful battle in which "Percy was slain and Douglas taken
prisoner," and the Welsh power broken in Owen Glendower. After getting a
glimpse of the most picturesque portion of Shropshire, halting at more
noble seats, and passing through a succession of Worcester towns, the royal
party reached Woodstock on the 7th of November, and the same evening rested
at Wytham House, belonging to the Earl of Abingdon. There was hardly time
to realise that the memories of Alice Lee, the old knight Sir Henry, and
the faithful dog Bevis, rivalled successfully the grisly story of Queen
Eleanor and Fair Rosamond. Nay, the magician was still dogging the
travellers' steps; for had he not made the little town of Abingdon his own
by choosing it for the meeting-place of Mike Lambourne and Tressillian, and
rebuilding in its neighbourhood the ruins of Cumnor Hall, on which the dews
fell softly? Alas! the wizard would weave no more spells. A month before
that princely "progress" Sir Walter Scott, after Herculean labours to pay
his debts like an honest man had wrecked even his robust frame and
healthful genius, lay dead at Abbotsford.

On the 8th of November the future Queen entered Oxford with something like
State, in proper form escorted by a detachment of Yeomanry. There is no
need to tell that she was received by the Vice-Chancellor of the
University, and the dons and doctors of the various colleges, in full
array. And she was told of former royal visitors: of Charles in his
tribulation; of her grandfather and grandmother, King George and Queen
Charlotte, when little Miss Barney was there to describe the festivities.
The Princess went the usual round: to superb Christ Church, at which her
sons were to graduate; to the Bodleian and Radclyffe libraries; to All
Souls, New College, &c. She proceeded to view other buildings, which,
unless in a local guide-book, are not usually included among the lions of
Oxford. But this young lady of the land was bound to encourage town as well
as gown; therefore she visited duly the Town Hall and Council Chamber. From
Oxford the tourists returned to Kensington.

There are no greater contrasts than those which are to be found in royal
lives. When the Princess Victoria was about to set out on her pleasant
journey in peace and prosperity, the news came of the arrest of the
Duchesse de Berri, at Nantes. It was the sequel to her gallant but
unsuccessful attempt to raise La Vendee in the name of her young son, Henri
de Bordeaux, and the end to the months in which she had lain in hiding.
She was discovered in the chimney of a house in the Rue Haute-du-Chateau,
where she was concealed with three other conspirators against the
Government of her cousin, Louis Philippe. The search had lasted for several
hours, during which these unfortunate persons were penned in a small space
and exposed to almost intolerable heat. A mantelpiece had been contrived so
as to turn on a swivel and form an opening into a suffocating recess. When
the Duchesse and her companions were found their hands were scorched and
part of their clothes burnt. She was taken to the fortress of Nantes, and
thence transferred to the Castle of Blaze, where she suffered a term of
imprisonment. She had acted entirely on her own responsibility, her wild
enterprise having being disapproved alike by her father-in-law, Charles X.,
and her brother and sister-in-law, the Duc and Duchesse d'Angouleme.

In 1833, we are told, the Duchess of Kent and the fourteen years old
Princess stopped on their way to Weymouth--the old favourite watering-place
of King George and Queen Charlotte--and visited the young Queen of
Portugal, at Portsmouth. Donna Maria da Gloria had been sent from Brazil to
England by her father, Don Pedro, partly for her safety, partly under the
impression, which proved false, that the English Government would take an
active part in her cause against the usurpation of her uncle, Don Miguel.
The Government did nothing. The royal family paid the stranger some courtly
and kindly attentions. One of the least exceptional passages in the late
Charles Greville's Memoirs is the description of the ball given by the
King, at which the two young queens--to be--were present. The chronicle
describes the girls, who were of an age--having been born in the same year:
the sensible face of the fair-haired English Princess, and the extreme
dignity--especially after she had sustained an accidental fall--of the
Portuguese royal maiden, inured to the hot sun of the tropics. Don Miguel
was routed in the course of the following year (1834), and his niece was
established in her kingdom. Within the same twelve months she lost a father
and gained and lost a husband; for among the first news that reached her
English acquaintances was her marriage, before she was sixteen, and her
widowhood within three months. She had married, in January, the Duc de
Leuchtenberg, a brother of her stepmother and a son of Eugene Beauharnais.
He died, after a short illness, in the following March. She married again
in the next year, her re-marriage having been earnestly desired by her
subjects. The second husband was Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, belonging to
the Roman Catholic branch of the Coburgs, and cousin both to the Queen and
the Prince Consort. He was a worthy and, ultimately, a popular prince.
Donna Maria was grand-niece to Queen Amelie of France, and showed much
attachment to the house of Orleans. There is said to have been a project
formed by Louis Philippe, which was frustrated by the English Government,
that she should marry one of his sons, the Duc de Nemours.

In addition to the English tours which the Princess Victoria made with her
mother, the Duchess of Kent was careful that as soon as her daughter had
grown old enough to profit by the association, she should meet the most
distinguished men of the day--whether statesmen, travellers, men of
science, letters, or art. Kensington had one well-known intellectual centre
in Holland House, presided over by the famous Lady Holland, and was soon to
have another in Gore House, occupied by Lady Blessington and Count D'Orsay;
but even if the fourteen years old Princess had been of sufficient age and
had gone into society, such _salons_ were not for her. The Duchess
must "entertain" for her daughter. In 1833 Lord Campbell mentions dining
at Kensington Palace. The company found the Princess in the drawing-room on
their arrival, and again on their return from the dining-room. He records
her bright, pleasant intelligence, perfect manners, and happy liveliness.

In July, 1834, when the Princess was fifteen, she was confirmed in the
Chapel Royal, St. James's, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence
of the King and Queen and the Duchess of Kent. She was advancing with rapid
steps to the point at which the girl leaves the child for ever behind her,
and stretches forward to her crown of young womanhood. She had in her own
name confirmed the baptismal vow which consecrated her as a responsible
being to the service of the King of kings. Still she was a young creature,
suffered to grow up according to a gracious natural growth, not forced into
premature expansion, permitted to preserve to the last the sweet girlish
trust and confidence, the mingled coyness and fearlessness, pensive dreams
and merry laughter, which constitute the ineffable freshness and tender
grace of youth.

If the earlier story of the purchase, or non-purchase, of the box at
Tunbridge Wells reads "like an incident out of 'Sandford and Merton,'"
there is another anecdote fitting into this time which has still more of
the good-fairy ring in it, while it sounds like a general endorsement of
youthful wisdom. Yet it may have had its origin in some eager, youthful
fancy of astonishing another girl, and giving her "the very thing she
wanted" as a reward for her exemplary behaviour. The Princess was visiting
a jeweller's shop incognito (a little in the fashion of Haroun-al-Raschid)
when she saw another young lady hang long over some gold chains, lay down
reluctantly the one which she evidently preferred, and at last content
herself with buying a cheaper chain. The interested on-looker waited till
the purchaser was gone, made some inquiries, directed that both chains
should be tied up and sent together, along with the Princess Victoria's
card, on which a few words were pencilled to the effect that the Princess
had been pleased to see prudence prevail, while she desired the young lady
to accept her original choice, in the hope that she would always persevere
in her laudable self-denial.

In the autumn of 1835 the Duchess of Kent and the Princess went as far
north as York, visiting the Archbishop at Bishopsthorpe, studying the
minster--second only to Westminster among English abbeys--and gracing with
the presence of royalty the great York Musical Festival. On the travellers'
homeward route they were the guests of the Earl of Harewood, at Harewood
House, Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth, and the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir.
At Burghley House the Duchess and the Princess visited the Marquis of
Exeter. The late Charles Greville met them there, and gives a few
particulars of their visit. "They arrived from Belvoir at three o'clock, in
a heavy rain, the civic authorities having turned out at Stamford to escort
them and a procession of different people, all very loyal. When they had
lunched, and the Mayor and his brethren had got dry, the Duchess received
the Address, which was read by Lord Exeter, as Recorder. It talked of the
Princess as 'destined to mount the throne of these realms.' Conroy handed
the answer just as the Prime Minister does to the King. They are splendidly
lodged, and great preparations have been made for their reception. The
dinner at Burghley was very handsome; hall well lit, and all went off well,
except that a pail of ice was landed in the Duchess's lap, which made a
great bustle. Three hundred people at the ball, which was opened by Lord
Exeter and the Princess, who, after dancing one dance, went to bed. They
appeared at breakfast next morning at nine o'clock, and at ten set off to
Holkham."

Romance was not much in Mr. Greville's way, but Burghley, apart from the
statesman Cecil and his weighty nod, had been the scene of such a romance
as might well have captivated the imagination of a young princess, though
its heroine was but a village maiden--she who married the
landscape-painter, and was brought by him to Burghley, bidden look around
at its splendour, and told

  "All of this is thine and mine."

Tennyson has sung it--how she grew a noble lady, and yet died of the honour
to which she was not born, and how the Lord of Burghley, deeply mourning,
bid her attendants

  "Bring the dress and put it on her
  Which she wore when we were wed."

In one of those autumns which the Duchess of Kent and her daughter spent at
Ramsgate--not so rural as it had been a dozen years before, but still a
quiet enough retreat--they received a visit from the King and Queen of the
Belgians. Prince Leopold was securely established on the throne which he
filled so well and so long, keeping it when many other European sovereigns
were unseated. He was accompanied by his second wife, Princess Louise of
France, daughter of Louis Philippe. She was a good woman, like all the
daughters of Queen Amelie, while Princess Marie, in addition to goodness,
had the perilous gift of genius. The following is Baron Stockmar's opinion
of the Queen of the Belgians. "From the moment that the (Queen Louise)
entered that circle in which I for so many years have had a place, I have
revered her as a pattern of her sex. We say and believe that men can be
noble and good; of her we know with certainty that she was so. We saw in
her daily a truthfulness, a faithful fulfilment of duty, which makes us
believe in the possible though but seldom evident nobleness of the human
heart. In characters such as the Queen's, I see a guarantee of the
perfection of the Being who has created human nature." We ought to add that
Stockmar had not only the highest opinion of the character of Queen Louise,
but also of her insight and judgment, and he often expressed his opinion
that if anything were to happen to King Leopold the Regency might be
entrusted to the Queen with perfect confidence.

How much the Queen valued Queen Louise, how she became Queen Victoria's
dearest friend, is fully shown at a later date by the extracts from the
Queen's journal, and letters in the "Life of the Prince Consort"

About this time the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria paid a visit to
the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle--the old tower with fruit-trees
growing in the dry moat, and a slip from the weeping-willow which hung over
the grave in St. Helena flourishing in its garden, where the Warden of the
Cinque Ports could look across the roadstead of the Downs and count the
ships' masts like trees in a forest, and watch the waves breaking twenty
feet high on the Goodwin Sands. "The cut-throat town of Deal" which poor
Lucy Hutchinson so abhorred, pranked its quaint red houses for so
illustrious and dainty a visitor. The Duke had stood by her font, and if he
had "no small talk," he was a courteous gentleman and gentle warrior when
he fought his battles over again for the benefit of the young Princess.

A winter was spent by the Duchess and the Princess at St. Leonard's, not
far from Battle Abbey, where the last Saxon king of England bit the dust,
and William of Normandy fought and won the great battle which rendered his
invasion a conquest.

1836 was an eventful year in the Queen's life. We read that the Duchess of
Kent and her daughter remained at Kensington till the month of September.
There was a good reason for staying at home in the early summer. The family
entertained friends: not merely valued, kinsfolk, but visitors who might
change the whole current of a life's history and deeply influence a destiny
on which the hopes of many hearts were fixed, that concerned the well-being
of millions of the human race. Princess Victoria had not grown up solitary
in her high estate. It has been already pointed out that she was one in a
group of cousins with whom she had cordial relations. But the time was
drawing near when nature and policy alike pointed to the advisability of
forming a closer tie, which would provide the Princess with companionship
and support stretching beyond those of her mother, and, if it were well and
wisely chosen, afford the people further assurance that the first household
in the kingdom should be such as they could revere. The royal maiden who
had been educated so wisely and grown up so simply and healthfully, was
approaching her seventeenth birthday. Already there were suitors in store
for her hand; as many as six had been seriously thought of--among them,
Prince Alexander of the Netherlands, whose suit was greatly favoured by
King William; Duke Ernest of Wurtemberg; Prince Adalbert of Prussia; and
Prince George of Cambridge. Prince George of Cumberland was _hors de
combat_, apart from the Duke of Cumberland's pretensions and the
alienation caused by them. Prince George, when a baby, had lost the sight
of one eye, a misfortune which his father shared. A few years later in the
son's boyhood, as he was at play in the gardens of Windsor Castle, he began
to amuse himself with flinging into the air and catching a long silk purse
with heavy gold tassels, when the purse fell on the seeing eye, inflicting
such an injury as to threaten him with total blindness. The last
catastrophe was brought about by the blunder of a famous German oculist
after Prince George had become Crown Prince of Hanover.

How much the Princess knew or guessed of those matrimonial prospects, how
far they fluttered her innocent heart, we cannot tell; but as of all the
candidates mentioned there was only one with whom she had any acquaintance
to speak of, it may be supposed that the generality of the proposed wooers
passed like vague shadows before her imagination.

In the meantime the devoted friends of her whole life had naturally not
left this question--the most important of all--entirely unapproached. Her
English cousins stood to her somewhat in the room of contemporary brothers
and sisters; for her own brother and sister, however united to her in
affection, were removed from her by age, by other ties, and by residence in
a foreign country, to which in 1833 there was still no highway well trodden
by the feet of kings and queens and their heirs-presumptive, as well as by
meaner people, such as we find to-day. But there were other cousins of whom
much had been said and heard, though they had remained unseen and
personally unknown. For that very reason they were more capable of being
idealised and surrounded by a halo of romance.

At the little ducal Court of Coburg there was the perfect young prince of
all knightly legends and lays, whom fate seemed to have mated with his
English cousin from their births within a few months of each other. When he
was a charming baby of three years the common nurse of the pair would talk
to him of his little far-away royal bride. The common grandmother of the
two, a wise and witty old lady, dwelt fondly on the future union of her
youngest charge with the "Mayflower" across the seas.

In all human probability these grandmotherly predictions would have come to
nothing had it not been for a more potent arbiter of the fortunes of his
family. King Leopold had once filled the very post which was now vacant,
for which there were so many eager aspirants. None could know as he knew
the manifold and difficult requirements for the office; none could care as
he cared that it should be worthily filled. His interest in England had
never wavered, though he had renounced his English annuity of fifty
thousand a year on his accession to the throne of Belgium. He was deeply
attached to the niece who stood nearly in the same position which Princess
Charlotte had occupied twenty years before. Away in Coburg there was a
princely lad whom he loved as a son, and who held the precise relation to
the ducal house which he himself had once filled. What was there to hinder
King Leopold from following out the comparison? Who could blame him for
seeking to rebuild, in the interest of all, the fair edifice of love and
happiness and loyal service which had been shattered before the dawn of
those lives--that were like the lives of his children--had arisen? Besides,
look where he might, and study character and chances with whatever
forethought, he could not find such another promising bridegroom for the
future Queen of England. Young, handsome, clever, good, endowed with all
winning attributes; with wise, well-balanced judgment in advance of his
years; with earnest, steadfast purpose, gentle, sympathetic temper, and
merry humour.

King Leopold's instinct was not at fault, as the result proved; but it was
not without the most careful consideration and many anxious consultations,
especially with his trusty old friend, Baron Stockmar, that the King
allowed himself to take the initiatory step in the matter. If the young
couple were to love and wed it was certainly necessary that they should
meet, that "the favourable impression" might be made, as the two honourable
conspirators put it delicately. For this there was no more time to be lost,
when so many suitors had already entered the lists, and the maiden only
wanted a year of the time fixed for her majority. But with conscientious
heedfulness for the feelings of the youthful pair, and for their power of
forming separately an unbiassed opinion, it was settled that when an
opportunity of becoming acquainted should be given them, the underlying
motive must be kept secret from the Princess as well as the Prince, that
they might be "perfectly at their ease with each other." This secrecy could
not, however, extinguish the previous knowledge which the Prince at least
possessed, that a marriage between the cousins had been mooted by some of
those most interested in their welfare.

In spite of the obstacles which King William raised, an invitation was sent
by the Duchess of Kent to her brother, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, to
pay her a visit, accompanied by his two sons, in the spring of 1836.
Accordingly, in the month which is the sweetest of the year, in spite of
inconstant skies and chill east winds, when Kensington Gardens were bowery
and fair with the tender green foliage--the chestnut and hawthorn
blossoms--the lilac and laburnum plumes of early summer, the goodly company
arrived, and made the old brick palace gay with the fresh and fitting
gaiety of youth.

We may never know how the royal cousins met--whether the frank, kind,
unconscious Princess came down under the wing of the Duchess as far as
their entrance into the Clock Court; whether there was a little dimness of
agitation and laughing confusion, in spite of the partial secrecy, in two
pairs of blue eyes which then encountered each other for the first time;
whether the courtly company ascended in well-arranged file, or in a little
friendly disorder. It was fortunate that there were more doors and halls
and staircases than one, for it goes without saying that nobody could have
had time and attention to spare for the wonderfully elaborate staircase,
the representation in _chiaroscuro_ of horses and warlike weapons, the
frieze with heads of unicorns and masks of lions. It must have been on
another day that young heads looked up in jest or earnest at Hercules,
Diana, Apollo, and Minerva, and stopped to pick out the heterogeneous
figures in the colonnade--"ladies, yeomen of the guard, pages, a quaker,
two Turks, a Highlander, and Peter the Wild Boy," which testified to the
liberal imagination of Kent, who executed not only the architecture, but
the painting, in the reign of George I.

The guests remained at Kensington for a month, the only drawback to their
pleasure being a little attack of bilious fever, from which Prince Albert
suffered for a few days. There is a published letter to his stepmother in
which the Prince tells his doings in the most unaffected, kindly fashion.
There were the King's levee, "long and fatiguing, but very interesting;"
the dinner at Court, and the "beautiful concert" which followed, at which
the guests had to stand till two o'clock; the King's birthday, with the
Drawing-room at St. James's Palace, where three thousand eight hundred
people passed before the King and Queen, and another great dinner and
concert in the evening. There was also the "brilliant ball" at Kensington
Palace, at which the gentlemen were in uniform and the ladies in fancy
dresses. Duke William of Brunswick, the Prince of Orange and his sons, and
the Duke of Wellington, were among the guests, and the Princes of Coburg
helped to keep up the ball till four o'clock. They spent a day with the
Duke of Northumberland at Sion House, they went to Claremont, and they were
so constantly engaged that they had to make the most of their time in order