Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen Volume I Part 17

But the Queen's cruises this year were not to end on English or even Scotch ground. She was to make the first visit to France which had been paid by an English sovereign since Henry VIII. met Francis I. on the field of the Cloth of Gold. Earlier in the year two of Louis Philippe's sons, the sailor Prince Joinville, "tall, dark, and good looking, with a large beard, but, unfortunately for him, terribly deaf," and his brother, the man of intellect and culture if not of genius, the Duc d'Aumale, "much shorter and very fair," had been together at Windsor; and had doubtless arranged the preliminaries of the informal visit which the Queen was to pay to Louis Philippe. The King of France and his large family were in the habit of spending some time in summer or autumn at Chateau d'Eu, near the seaport of Treport, in Normandy; and to this point the Queen could easily run across in her yacht and exchange friendly greetings, without the elaborate preparations and manifold trouble which must be the accompaniment of a State visit to the Tuileries.

Accordingly the Queen and Prince Albert, on the 1st of September, sailed past the Eddystone Lighthouse, where they were joined by a little fleet of war-s.h.i.+ps, and struck off for the coast of France. Besides her suite, the Queen was accompanied by two of her ministers, Lords Aberdeen and Liverpool. With the first, a shrewd worthy Scot, distinguished as a statesman by his experience, calm sagacity, and unblemished integrity, her Majesty and Prince Albert were destined to have cordial relations in the years to come.

In the meantime, French country people were pouring into Treport, where the King's barge lay ready. It was provided with a crimson silk awning, having white muslin curtains over a horseshoe-shaped seat covered with crimson velvet, capable of containing eleven or twelve persons. The rowers were clad in white, with red sashes and, red ribands round their hats.

The Queen was to land by crossing the deck of a vessel moored along the quay and mounting a ladder, the steps of which were covered with crimson velvet. At five o'clock in the afternoon the King and his whole family, a great cortege, arrived on horseback and in open chars-a-bancs. Prince Joinville had met the yacht at Cherbourg and gone on board. As soon as it lay-to the King came alongside in his barge. The citizen King was stout, florid, and bluff-looking, with thick grizzled hair brushed up into a point. As the exiled Duke of Orleans, in the days of the great Revolution, he had been a friend of the Queen's father, the Duke of Kent. The King did not fail to remind his guest of this, after he had kissed her on each check, kissed her hand, and told her again and again how delighted he was to see her. When the two sovereigns entered the barge the standards of England and France were hoisted together, and amidst royal salutes from the vessels in the roads and from the batteries on sh.o.r.e, to the music of regimental bands, in the sunset of a fine autumn evening the party landed.

At the end of the jetty the ladies of the royal family of France with their suites stood in a curved line. Queen Amelie, with her snowy curls and benevolent face, was two paces in advance of the others. Behind her were her daughter and daughter-in-law, the Queen of the Belgians and the widowed d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, who appeared in public for the first time since her husband's death a year before. A little farther back stood Madame Adelaide, the King's sister, and the other princesses, the younger daughter and the daughters-in-law of the house. Louis Philippe presented Queen Victoria to his Queen, who "took her by both hands and saluted her several times on both cheeks with evident warmth of manner." Queen Louise, and at least one of the other ladies, were well known to the visitor, whom they greeted gladly, while the air was filled with shouts of "Vive la Reine Victoria!" "Vive la Reine d'Angleterre!"

The Queen, who was dressed simply, as usual, in a purple satin gown, a black mantilla trimmed with lace, and a straw bonnet with straw-coloured ribands and one ostrich feather, immediately entered the King's char-a-bancs, which had a canopy and curtains that were left open. Lady Bloomfield describes it as drawn by twelve large clumsy horses. There was a coachman on the box, with three footmen behind, and there was "a motley crowd of outriders on wretched horses and dressed in different liveries."

The other chars-a-bancs with six horses followed, and the whole took their, way to the Chateau, a quaint and pleasant dwelling, some of it as old as the time of the Great Mademoiselle.

A stately banquet was held in the evening in the banqueting-room, hung round with royal portraits and historical pictures, the table heavy with gold and silver plate, including the gold plateau and the great gold vases filled with flowers. The King, in uniform, sat at the centre of the table.

He had on his right hand Queen Victoria, wearing a gown of crimson velvet, the order of the garter and a _parure_ of diamonds and emeralds, but having her hair simply braided. On her other side sat Prince Joinville. On the King's left hand was Queen Louise. The d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, in accordance with French etiquette for widows in their weeds, did not come to the dinner-table. Opposite the King sat his Queen, with Prince Albert on her right hand and the Duc d'Aumale on her left. The royal host and hostess carved like any other old-fas.h.i.+oned couple.

The Queen received the same lively impressions from her first visit to France that she had experienced on her first visit to Scotland. Apart from the scenery there was yet more to strike her. The decidedly foreign dresses of the people, the strange tongue, the mill going on Sunday, the different sound of the church bells--nothing escaped her. There was also, in the large family of her brother king and ally--connected with her by so many ties, every member familiar to her by hearsay, if not known to her personally--much to interest her. The Queen had been, to all intents and purposes, brought up like an only child, and her genial disposition had craved for entire sympathy and equal companions.h.i.+p. She seems to have regarded wistfully, as an only child often regards, what she had never known, the full, varied, yet united life of a large, happy, warmly attached family circle. When she saw her children possessed of the blessing which had been denied to her in her early days, she was tempted to look back on the widowed restricted household in Kensington Palace as on a somewhat chill and grey environment. She has more than once referred to her childhood as dull and sad by comparison with what she lived to know of the young life of other children.

But the great royal household of France at this date, in addition to its wealth of interests and occupations, and its kindness to the stranger who was so quick to respond to kindness, was singularly endowed with elements of attractiveness for Queen Victoria. It appeared, indeed, as if all life at its different stages, in its different aspects, even in its different nationalities, met and mingled with a wonderful charm under the one roof-tree. Besides the old parent couple and the maiden aunt, who had seen such changes of fortune, there were three young couples, each with their several careers before them. There was the bride of yesterday, the youngest daughter of the house, Princess Clementine, with her young German husband, the Queen and Prince Albert's kinsman; there was Nemours, wedded to another German cousin, the sweet-tempered golden-haired Princess Victoire; there was Joinville, with his dark-haired Brazilian Princess.

[Footnote: A kinswoman of Maria da Gloria's] It had been said that he had gone farther, as became a sailor, in search of a wife than any other prince in Europe. She was very pretty in a tropical fas.h.i.+on, very piquante, and, perhaps, just a little _sauvage_. She had never seen snow, and the rules and ceremonies of a great European court were almost as strange to her. Lady Bloomfield mentions her as if she were something of a spoilt child who could hardly keep from showing that the rigid laws of her new position fretted and bored her. She wore glowing pomegranate blossoms in her hair, and looked pensive, as if she were pining for the gorgeous little hummingbirds and great white magnolias--the mixture of natural splendour and ease, pa.s.sion and languor, of a typical South American home.

D'Aumale and Montpensier were still gay young bachelors, and well would it have been for the welfare of the Orleans family and the credit of Louis Philippe if one of them had remained so. There was a widow as well as a bride in the house. There were the cherished memories of a dearly-prized lost son and daughter to touch with tender sorrow its blithest moments and lightest words. The Queen had to make the acquaintance of Helene, d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans; [Footnote: Princess Helena of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.] tall, thin and pale, not handsome, but better than handsome, full of character and feeling, shrinking from observation in her black dress, with the shadow of a life-long grief over her heart and life. And the visitor had to hear again of the gifted Princess Marie, the friend of Ary Scheffer, whose statue of Jeanne d'Arc is the best monument of a life cut down in its brilliant promise. Princess Marie's devoted sister Louise, Queen of the Belgians, in her place as the eldest surviving daughter of France, had long been Queen Victoria's great friend. Finally, there was the third generation, headed by the fatherless boy, "little Paris," with regard to whom few then doubted that he would one day sit on the throne of France.

It was not princ.i.p.ally because the Chateau d'Eu was in France that the Queen wrote, the first morning she awoke there, the fulfilment of her favourite air-castle of so many years was like a dream, or that she grieved when her visit was over. She sought to find, and believed she had found, a whole host of new friends and kindred--another father and mother, more brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, to make her life still richer and more full of kindly ties.

The speciality in the form of entertainment at Chateau d'Eu was drives in the sociable chars-a-bancs in the neighbouring forest, ending in _dejeuners_ and _fetes-champetres_, which the Queen enjoyed heartily, both because they were novel to her and because they were spontaneous and untrammelled. "So pretty, so merry, so rural," she declared. "Like the fetes in Germany," Prince Albert said. The long, frequently rough drives under the yellowing trees in the golden September light, the camp-chairs, the wine in plain bottles, the improvised kitchen hidden among the bushes, the many young people of high rank all so gay, the king full of liveliness and brusqueness, his queen full of motherliness and consideration for all--everything was delightful.

One pathetic little incident occurred when the guests were being shown over the parish church of Notre Dame. As they came to the crypt, with its ancient monuments of the Comtes d'Eu, the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans was overcome with emotion, and the Queen of the Belgians drew her aside. When the rest of the party pa.s.sed again through the church, on their way back, they came upon the two mourning women prostrate before one of the altars, the d.u.c.h.esse weeping bitterly.

The King presented Queen Victoria with fine specimens of Gobelin tapestry and of Sevres china. He went farther in professions and compliments. He was not content to leave the discussion of politics to M. Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. Louis Philippe volunteered to the Queen's minister the statement that he would not give his son to Spain (referring to a proposed marriage between the Duc de Montpensier and the Infanta Luisa, the sister of the young Queen Isabella, who had been lately declared of age), even if he were asked. To which the stout Scot replied, without beating about the bush, "that except one of the sons of France, any aspirant whom Spain might choose would be acceptable to England."

Louis Philippe, Queen Amelie, and the whole family escorted the Queen and the Prince on board the yacht, parting with them affectionately. Prince Joinville accompanied the couple to the Pavilion, Brighton. In the course of the sail there was a race between his s.h.i.+p and the _Black Eagle_, in which the English vessel won, to the French sailors' disgust.

Louis Philippe felt great satisfaction at a visit which proved his cordial relations with England, and served to remove the reproach which he seemed to think clung to him and prevented the other European royal families from fraternising with him and his children as they would otherwise have done--namely, that he was not the representative of the elder, and what many were pleased to consider the legitimate, branch of the Bourbons. He was but a king set up by the people, whom the people might pull down again. There was not much apparent prospect of this overthrow then, though the forces were at work which brought it about. In token of his gratification, and as a memorial of what had given him so much pleasure, the King caused a series of pictures to be taken of Queen Victoria's landing, and of the various events of her stay. These pictures remain, among several series, transferred to the upper rooms of one of the French palaces, and furnish glimpses of other things that have vanished besides the fas.h.i.+on of the day. There the various groups reappear. Queen Amelie with her piled-up curls, the citizen King and their numerous young people doing honour to the young Queen of England and her husband, both looking juvenile in their turn--all the more so for a certain antiquated cut in their garments at this date, a formality in his hat and neckerchief, a demureness in her close bonnet, and a pretty show of youthful matronliness in the little lace cap which, if we mistake not, she wears on one occasion.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE QUEEN'S TRIP TO OSTEND:--VISITS TO DRAYTON, CHATSWORTH, AND BELVOIR.

_"Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute."_ In the course of another week the Queen took a second trip to the Continent, sailing to Ostend to pay the most natural visit in the world--the only thing singular about it was that it had been so long delayed--to her uncle, King Leopold. The yacht, which had been lying off Brighton, was accompanied by eight other steamers, and joined at Walmer by two s.h.i.+ps of the line. At Dover a salute was fired from the castle. At Deal the Duke of Wellington came on board and dined with the royal party, the Queen watching with some anxiety the return of the old man in his boat, through a considerable surf which wetted him thoroughly, before he mounted his horse and rode off to Walmer, to superintend the illumination of the Castle in lines of light. In like manner every s.h.i.+p lying in the Downs glittered through the darkness.

At two o'clock on the following afternoon the Queen and the Prince reached Ostend, where they were received by King Leopold and Queen Louise. There had been some uncertainty whether the travellers, after not too smooth a pa.s.sage, would be equal to the fatigue of a banquet at the Hotel de Ville that evening. But repose is the good thing to which royalty can rarely attain, so it was settled that the banquet should go on. The display was less, and there was more of undress among the chief personages than there had been at the opening banquet at Chateau d'Eu. The Queen must have looked to her host not far removed from the docile young niece he had so carefully trained and tutored, as she sat by him in white lace and muslin, with flowers in her hair--only bound by a _ferroniere_ of diamonds.

The King and Prince Albert were in plain clothes, save that they showed the ribands and insignia of the orders of the Garter and the Bath; the Queen of the Belgians wore a white lace bonnet. It was in the main a simple family party made for the travellers.

The next day the Prince and Princess of Hohenlohe arrived, when the elder sister would have knelt and paid her homage to the younger, had not her Majesty prevented her with a sisterly embrace. Ostend was the head-quarters of the royal party, from which in the mellow autumn time they visited Bruges and Ghent. "The old cities of Flanders had put on their fairest array and were very tastefully decorated with tapestries, flowers, trees, pictures, &c. &c." The crowds of staid Flemings wore stirred up to joyous enthusiasm.

The Queen's artistic tastes, in addition to her fresh sympathies and her affection for her uncle and his wife, rendered the whole scene delightful to her. She was fitted to relish each detail, from the carillons to the carvings. She inspected all that was to be seen at Bruges, from the Palace of Justice to the Chapel of the Holy Blood. At Ghent, she went to the church of St. Bavon, where the Van Eycks have left the best part of their wonderful picture before the altar while the dust of Hubert and Margaret, rests in the crypt below. She saw the fragment of the palace in which John of Gaunt was born, when an English queen-consort, Philippa, resided there five hundred years before. She visited the old Beguinage, with the shadowlike figures of the nuns in black and white flitting to and fro.

From Ostend the Queen and Prince Albert proceeded to the cheerful, prosperous, and, by comparison, modern town of Brussels, King Leopold's capital, and stayed a night at his palace of Lacken, which had been built by Prince Albert's ancestor and namesake, Duke Albert of Sechsen, when he governed the Netherlands along with his wife the Archd.u.c.h.ess Christina, the favourite daughter of Maria Theresa and the sister of Marie Antoinette. From Brussels the travellers journeyed to Antwerp, where they saw another grand cathedral and witnessed the antique spectacle of "the Giant" before the palace in the _Place de Mer._

On leaving Antwerp, the Queen and the Prince sailed for England, escorted so far on their way by King Leopold and Queen Louise. "It was such a joy to me," her Majesty wrote to her uncle, soon after their parting, "to be once again under the roof of one who has ever been a father to me." The vessel lay all night in Margate Roads, and the next morning arrived at Woolwich.

In the month of October her Majesty and the Prince visited Cambridge, where he received his degree of LL.D. A witty letter, written by Professor Sedgwick, describing the royal visit to the Woodwardian Museum, is quoted by Sir Theodore Martin

"....I received a formidable note from our master telling me of an intended royal visit to the Woodwardian den of wild beasts, immediately after Prince Albert's degree; and enjoining me to clear a pa.s.sage by the side entrance through the old divinity schools. This threw me off my balance, for since the building of the new library this place of ancient theological disputation has been converted into a kind of lumber-room, and was filled from end to end with every kind of unclean things--mops, slop-pails, chimney-pots, ladders, broken benches, rejected broken cabinets, two long ladders, and an old rusty scythe were the things that met the eye, and all covered with half an inch of venerable dust. There is at the end of the room a kind of gallery or gangway, by which the undergraduates used to find their way to my lecture-room, but this was also full of every kind of rubbish and abomination. We did our best; soon tumbled all impediments into the area below, spread huge mats over the slop-pails, and, in a time incredibly short, a goodly red carpet was spread along the gangway, and thence down my lecture-room to the door of the Museum. But still there was a dreadful evil to encounter. What we had done brought out such a rank compound of villanous smells that even my plebeian nose was sorely put to it; so I went to a chemist's, procured certain bottles of sweet odours, and sprinkled them cunningly where most wanted.

"Inside the Museum all was previously in order, and inside the entrance door from the gangway was a huge picture of the Megatherium, under which the Queen must pa.s.s to the Museum, and at that place I was to receive her Majesty. So I dusted my outer garments and ran to the Senate House, and I was just in time to see the Prince take his degree and join in the acclamations. This ended, I ran back to the feet of the Megatherium, and in a few minutes the royal party entered the mysterious gangway above described. They halted, I half thought in a spirit of mischief, to contemplate the furniture of the schools, and the Vice-chancellor (Whewell) pointed out the beauties of the dirty spot where Queen Bess had sat two hundred and fifty years before, when she presided at the Divinity Act. A few steps more brought them under the feet of the, Megatherium. I bowed as low as my anatomy would let me, and the Queen and Prince bowed again most graciously, and so began act first. The Queen seemed happy and well pleased, and was mightily taken with one or two of my monsters, especially with the 'Plesiosaurus,' and a gigantic stag. The subject was new to her; but the Prince evidently had a good general knowledge of the old world, and not only asked good questions and listened with great courtesy to all I had to say, but in one or two instances helped me on by pointing to the rare things in my collection, especially in that part of it which contains the German fossils. I thought myself very fortunate in being able to exhibit the finest collection of German fossils to be seen in England. They fairly went the round of the Museum, neither of them seemed in a hurry, and the Queen was quite happy to hear her husband talk about a novel subject with so much knowledge and spirit. He called her back once or twice to look at a fine impression of a dragon-fly which I have in the Solenhope slate. Having glanced at the long succession of our fossils, from the youngest to the oldest, the party again moved into the lecture-room. The Queen was again mightily taken with the long neck of the Plesiosaurus; under it was a fine head of an Ichthyosaurus which I had just been unpacking. I did not know anything about it, as I had myself never seen its face before, for it arrived in my absence. The Queen asked what it was. I told her as plainly as I could. She then asked whence it came; and what do you think I said? That I did not know the exact place, but I believed it came as a delegate from the monsters of the lower world to greet her Majesty on her arrival at the University. I did not repeat this till I found that I had been overheard, and that my impertinence had been talked of among my Cambridge friends. All was, however, taken in good part, and soon afterwards the royal party again approached the mysterious gangway. The Queen and Prince bowed, the Megatherium packed up his legs close under the abdominal region of his august body, the royal pageant pa.s.sed under, and was soon out of my sight and welcomed by the cheers of the mult.i.tude before the library.

"I will only add that I went through every kind of backward movement to admiration of all beholders, only having once trodden on the hinder part of my ca.s.sock, and never once having fallen during my retrogradations before the face of the Queen. In short, had I been a king crab, I could not have walked backwards better."

When in Cambridges.h.i.+re the Queen and the Prince visited Lord Hardwicke at Wimpole, where the whole county was a.s.sembled at a ball, and Earl De la Warr at Bourne.

In this month of October the great agitator for the repeal of the Irish Union, Daniel O'Connell, was arrested, in company with other Irish agitators, on a charge of sedition and conspiracy. After a prolonged trial, which lasted to the early summer of the following year, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and the payment of a fine of two thousand pounds, with recognisances to keep the peace for seven years. The sentence lapsed on technical grounds, but its moral effect was considerable.

In the month of September the Queen and Prince Albert visited Sir Robert Peel at Drayton, travelling by railroad, with every station they pa.s.sed thronged by spectators. At Rugby the pupils of the great school, headed by Dr. Tait, were drawn up on the platform. Sir Robert Peel received his guests in a pavilion erected for the occasion, and conducted her Majesty to her carriage, round which was an escort of Staffords.h.i.+re yeomanry. At the entrance to the town of Tamworth, the mayor, kneeling, presented his mace, with the words, "I deliver to your Majesty the mace;" to which the Queen replied, "Take it, it cannot be in better hands."

At eight o'clock in the evening Sir Robert Peel conducted the Queen, who wore pink silk and a profusion of emeralds and diamonds, to the dining-room, Prince Albert giving his arm to Lady Peel. Among the guests were the Duke of Wellington and the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Buccleugh. The d.u.c.h.ess on one occasion during the visit wore an old brocade which had belonged to a great grand-aunt of the Duke's, and was p.r.o.nounced very beautiful. After dinner the party withdrew to the library. Either on this evening or the next the Queen played at the quaint old game of "Patience,"

with some of her ladies, while the gentlemen "stood about."

On the following day her Majesty walked in the grounds, while Prince Albert gratified an earnest wish by visiting Birmingham and inspecting its manufactures, undeterred, perhaps rather allured, by the fact that the great town of steel and iron was regarded as one of the centres of Chartism. This did not prevent its mighty population from displaying the most exultant loyalty as they pressed round the carriage in which the Prince and the Mayor, reported to be a rank Chartist, drove to gla.s.s and silver-plate manufactories and papier-mache works, the town hall, and the schools.

At the railway station the Prince was joined by the Queen-dowager and Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, who came from Whitley Court to accompany him back to Drayton. The next morning was devoted to shooting, when Prince Albert confirmed his good character as a sportsman by bringing down sixty pheasants, twenty-five hares, eight rabbits, one woodc.o.c.k, and two wild ducks. In the afternoon the Queen visited Lichfield, to which she had gone as "the young Princess." Indeed, the next part of the tour was over old ground in Derbys.h.i.+re, for from Drayton the royal couple proceeded to Chatsworth, and spent several days amidst the beauties of the Peak. Twenty thousand persons were a.s.sembled in the magnificent grounds at Chatsworth, and artillery had been brought from Woolwich to fire a salute. Many old friends, notably members of the great Whig houses--Lord Melbourne, Lord and Lady Palmerston, the Marquis and Marchioness of Normanby--met to grace the occasion. There was a grand ball, at which the aristocracy of invention and industry, trade and wealth, represented by the Arkwrights and the Strutts, mingled with the autocracy of ancient birth and landed property. Mrs. Arkwright was presented to the Queen. Her Majesty opened the ball with the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re, dancing afterwards with Lord Morpeth and Lord Leveson--in the last instance, "a country dance, with much vigour"--and waltzing with Prince Albert. On the 2nd of December the party visited Haddon Hall, the ancient seat of the Vernons, where Dorothy Vernon lived and loved. On their return in the evening, the great conservatory was brilliantly illuminated, and there was a display of fireworks.

On the 3rd, Sunday, the Queen walked through the kitchen gardens and botanical gardens, and drove to Edensor. On the return of the party by the Home Farm, they went to see a prize-pig, weighing seventy pounds. The day ended with a concert of sacred music.

On Monday, the 4th, the Queen and the Prince parted from the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re at Derby, and proceeded to Nottingham--not to visit what remained of the Castle so long a.s.sociated with John and Lucy Hutchinson, or to penetrate to the cradle of hosiery, daring an encounter with the "Nottingham Lambs," the roughest of roughs, who at election times were wont to add to their natural beauties by painting their faces red, white, and blue, as savages tattoo themselves--but as a step on the way to Belvoir, the seat of the Duke of Rutland. There her Majesty entered that most aristocratic portion of England known as "The Dukeries." The Duke of Rutland, attended by two hundred of his tenantry on horseback, awaited his guests at Red Mile, and rode with them the three miles to Belvoir. Soon after the Queen's arrival, Dr. Stanton presented her Majesty with the key of Stanton Town, according to the tenure on which that estate is held.

Belvoir was a sight in itself, even after the stately lawns of Chatsworth.

"I do not know whether you ever saw Belvoir," writes f.a.n.n.y Kemble; "it is a beautiful place; the situation is n.o.ble, and the views, from the windows of the castle, and the terraces and gardens hanging over the steep hill crowned by it, is charming. The whole vale of Belvoir, and miles of meadow and woodland, lie stretched below it, like a map unrolled to the distant horizon, presenting extensive and varied prospects in every direction; while from the glen which surrounds the castle-hill, like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the s.n.a.t.c.hes of birds' carolling, and cawing rooks' discourse, float up to one from the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands on the battlemented terraces."

December was not the best time for seeing some of the attractions of Belvoir; but Lady Bloomfield has written of her Majesty's proverbial good fortune in these excursions: "The Queen yachts during the equinox, and has the sea a dead calm; visits about in the dead of winter, and has summer weather." There were other respects in which Belvoir was in its glory in midwinter--it belonged to a hunting neighbourhood and a hunting society.

Whereas at Drayton and Chatsworth the royal pair had been princ.i.p.ally surrounded by Tory and Whig statesmen, at Belvoir, while the Queen-dowager and some of the most distinguished members of the company at Chatsworth were again of the party, the Queen and the Prince found themselves in the centre of the fox-hunters of Melton Mowbray.

Happily, the Prince could hunt with the best, and the Queen liked to look on at her husband's sport, so that the order of the day was the throwing off of the hounds at Croxton. In the evening the Queen played whist. The next day there was a second splendid meet royally attended, with cards again at night. The Prince wrote of one of these "runs," to Baron Stockmar, that he had distinguished himself by keeping up with the hounds all through. "Anson" and "Bouverie" had both fallen on his left and right, but he had come off "with a whole skin." We are also told that the Prince's horsemans.h.i.+p excited the amazed admiration of the spectators, to the Queen's half-impatient amus.e.m.e.nt. "One can scarcely credit the absurdity of the people," she wrote to her uncle, King Leopold; "but Albert's riding so boldly has made such a sensation that it has been written all over the country, and they make much more of it than if he had done some great act." Apparently the Melton Mowbray fox-hunters had, till now, hardly appreciated that fine combination of physical and mental qualities, which is best expressed in two lines of an old song:--

His step is foremost in the ha', His sword in battle keen.

On the 7th of December the visitors left for Windsor, pa.s.sing through endless triumphal arches on the road, greeted at Leicester by seven thousand school children.

Shortly after the Queen's return home, she and the Prince heard, with regret, of the death of Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch. The veteran fell, indeed, like a shock of corn ripe for the garner, until it had been difficult to recognise in the feeble, nearly blind old man, upwards of ninety, the stout soldier of Barossa and Vittoria. But he carried with him many a memory which could never be recalled. Gallant captain though he was, his whole life was touched with tender romance. Born only four years after the Jacobite rebellion of '45, married in 1774, when he was twenty-five years of age, to his beautiful wife, the Hon. Mary Cathcart--whose sister Jane was married on the same day to John, Duke of Athole--for eighteen years Mr. Graham lived the quiet life of a country gentleman in Lynedoch Cottage, the most charming of cottages _ornes_, thatch-roofed, with a conservatory as big as itself, set down in a fine park. The river Almond flowed by, serving as a kind of boundary, and marking the curious limit which the plague kept in its last visit to Scotland. On a green "haugh" beneath what is known as the Burnbraes, within a short distance of Lynedoch Cottage, may be seen the carefully-kept double grave of two girls heroines of Scotch song, who died there of the "pest," from which they were fleeing.

Mr. Graham was happy in his marriage, though it is said Mrs. Graham did not relish that element in her lot which had made her the wife of a simple commoner, while her sister, not more fair, was a d.u.c.h.ess. Death entered on the scene, and caused the distinctions of rank to be forgotten. The cherished wife was laid in a quiet grave in Methven kirk-yard, and the childless widower mourned for the desire of his heart with a grief that refused to be comforted. By the advice of his friends, who feared for his reason or his life, he went abroad, where he joined Lord Hood as a volunteer. It is said he fought his first battle in a black coat, with the hope that, being thus rendered conspicuous in any act of daring which he might perform, he would be stricken down before the day was done. Honours, not death, were to be his portion in his new career. A commission, rapid promotion, the praise of his countrymen followed. He received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. It was on this occasion that Sheridan said eloquently, in allusion to the soldier's services in the retreat to Corunna, "In the hour of peril Graham was their best adviser, in the hour of disaster Graham was their surest consolation." A peerage, which there was none to share or inherit, a pension, the Orders of the Bath, of St.

Michael and St. George, &c. &c., were conferred upon him. It seemed only the other day since Lord Lynedoch, hearing of her Majesty's first visit to Scotland, hurried home from Switzerland to receive his queen. A place in Westminster Abbey was ready for all that was mortal of him, but he had left express injunctions that he was to be buried in Methven kirk-yard, beside the wife of his youth, dead more than half a century before.

Most people know the history of Gainsborough's lovely picture of Mrs.

Graham, the glory of the Scotch National Gallery--that it was not brought home till after the death of the lady, whose husband could not bear to look on her painted likeness, and sent it, in its case, to the care of a London merchant, in whose keeping it remained unopened, and well-nigh forgotten, for upwards of fifty years. On Lord Lynedoch's death, the picture came into the possession of his heir, Mr. Graham, of Redgorton, who presented it--a n.o.ble gift--to the Scotch National Academy.