Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen Volume II Part 11

Henry Greville tells an almost piteous incident of this visit, in relation to the Duke of Wellington and his advanced age, with the infirmities that could no longer be repelled. After saying that in order to prevent the procession's becoming too large, no other guest at Worsley was admitted into it, except the privileged old Duke, whom the teller of the story describes as driving in the carriage with Henry Greville's sister, Lady Enfield, one of the ladies in attendance on the Queen, he goes on to mention "he (the Duke) was received with extraordinary enthusiasm; notwithstanding Lady Enfield had to nudge him constantly, to keep him awake, both going and coming, with very little success." Lady Enfield adds a note to her brother's narrative.

"The whole scene was one of the most exciting I ever saw in my life.

Being carried away by the general enthusiasm, and feeling that the people would be disappointed if no notice was taken of their cheering, I at last exclaimed 'Duke, Duke, that's for _you_.' Thereupon he opened his eyes, and obediently made his well-known salutation, two fingers to the brim of his hat."

The next morning when the Prince had started by seven o'clock to inspect a model factory near Bolton, while there was a long and busy day before them, the Queen made a little entry in her journal which will find a sorrowful echo in many a faithful heart, "This day is full of sad recollections, being the anniversary of the loss of my beloved Louise (Queen of the Belgians), that kind, precious friend, that angelic being whose loss I shall ever feel."

The same pleasant pa.s.sage was made by the ca.n.a.l back to Patricroft, where the railway carriages were entered and the train steamed to Stockport. Crewe, Stafford--there another old soldier, Lord Anglesey, was waiting--Rugby, Weedon, Wolverton, and Watford, then at five o'clock the railway journey ended. The royal carriages were in attendance, and rest and home were near at hand. The day had been hot and fatiguing, but the evening was soft and beautiful with moonlight; a final change of horses at Uxbridge, the carriage shut when the growing darkness prevented any farther necessity for seeing and being seen; at half-past seven, Windsor, and the three little children still up and at the door "well and pleased."

From Windsor the Court went for some days to London for the closing of the Exhibition. The number of visitors had been six millions two hundred thousand, and the total receipts five hundred thousand pounds.

There had not been a single accident, "We ought, indeed, to be thankful to G.o.d for such a success," the Prince wrote reverently. On the 14th of October the Queen paid a farewell visit to the place in which she had been so much interested, with the regret natural on such an occasion. "It looked so beautiful," she wrote in her journal, "that I could not believe it was the last time I was to see it." But already the dismantling had begun.

The Queen refers in the next breath to a heroine of the Exhibition, an old Cornish woman named Mary Kerlynack, who had found the spirit to walk several hundreds of miles to behold the wonder of her generation.

This day she was at one of the doors to see another sight, the Queen.

"A most hale old woman" her Majesty thought Mary, "who was near crying at my looking at her."

On the 15th, a cheerlessly wet day, in keeping with a somewhat melancholy scene, Prince Albert and his fellow commissioners closed the Exhibition--a ceremony at which it was not judged desirable the Queen should be present, though she grieved not to witness the end as well as the beginning. "How sad and strange to think this great and bright time has pa.s.sed away like a dream," her Majesty wrote once more in her diary. The day of the closing of the Exhibition happened to be the twelfth anniversary of the Queen's betrothal to the Prince.

The tidings arrived in the course of November of the death, in his eighty-first year, in the old palace of Herrenhausen, on the 18th of the month, of the King of Hanover, the fifth, and last surviving son of George III and Queen Charlotte. He had been more popular as a king than as a prince.

The arrival of Kossuth in England in the autumn of 1851 had brought a disturbing element into international politics. But it was left for Louis Napoleon's _coup d'etat_ in Paris on the 2nd of December, when the blood shed so mercilessly on the Boulevards was still fresh in men's minds, to get Lord Palmerston into a dilemma, from which there was no disentanglement but the loss of office on his part.

An impetus, great though less lasting than it seemed, was given this year to emigration to Australia, by the discovery in the colony of gold in quartz beds, under much the same conditions that the precious metal had been found in California. The diggings, with the chance of a large nugget, became for a time the favourite dream of adventurers.

Nay, the dream grew to such an absorbing desire, that men heard of it as a disease known as "the gold fever." And quiet people at home were told that it was hardly safe for a s.h.i.+p to enter some of the Australian harbours, on account of the certainty of the desertion of the crew, under whatever penalties, that they might repair to the last El Dorado.

The successful ambition of Louis Napoleon and his power over the French army, began to excite the fears of Europe with regard to French aggression, and a renewal of the desolating wars of the beginning of the century; before the talk about the Exhibition and the triumphs of peace had well died on men's lips. The Government was anxious to fall back on the old resource of calling out the militia, with certain modifications and changes--brought before Parliament in the form of a Militia Bill. It did not meet with the approval of the members any more than of the Duke of Wellington, whose experience gave his opinion much weight. Lord Palmerston spoke with great ability against the measure. The end was that the Government suffered a defeat, and the Ministry resigned office in February, 1852. This time Lord Derby was successful in forming a new Cabinet, in which Mr. Disraeli was Chancellor of the Exchequer. A fresh Militia Bill was brought forward and carried by the new Government, after it had received the warm advocacy of the Duke of Wellington. The old man spoke in its favour with an amount of vigour and clear-headedness which showed that however his bodily strength might be failing, his mental power remained untouched.

CHAPTER XXI.

DISASTERS--YACHTING TRIPS--THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

The month of February, 1852, was unhappily distinguished by three great English calamities, accompanied by extensive loss of life. The first was the destruction of the West India mail steamer _Amazon_ by fire, as she was entering the Bay of Biscay, in which a hundred and forty persons perished, among them Eliot Warburton, the accomplished traveller and author.

The second was the wreck of her Majesty's troop-s.h.i.+p _Birkenhead_ near the Cape of Good Hope, with the loss of upwards of four hundred lives, in circ.u.mstances when the discipline and devotion of the men were of the n.o.blest description. The third was the bursting of the Bilberry Reservoir in midland England, with the sacrifice of nearly a hundred lives and a large amount of property.

When the season commenced, and it was this year, as last, particularly gay, a reflection of the general prosperity of the country, with the high hopes inspired by the Australian gold-fields, the Queen wrote to the King of the Belgians in order to re-a.s.sure him with regard to a fear which seems to have arisen in the elderly man's mind, that she whom he remembered at the beginning of her reign as fond of pleasure and untiring in her amus.e.m.e.nts, might be swept away in the tide.

"Allow me just to say one word about the London season. The London season for us consists of two State b.a.l.l.s and two concerts. (The State b.a.l.l.s and concerts are given to this day, though her Majesty, since her widowhood, has ceased to attend them. The Queen's place and that of Prince Albert in these social gaieties, have been naturally taken by the Prince and Princess of Wales.) We are hardly ever later than twelve o'clock at night, and our only dissipation is going three or four times a week to the play or opera, which is a great amus.e.m.e.nt and relaxation to us both. As for going out as people do here every night, to b.a.l.l.s and parties, and to breakfasts and teas all day long besides, I am sure no one would stand it worse than I should; so you see, dearest uncle, that in fact the London season is nothing to us."

So much higher, and more solid and lasting, as they should have been, were the pursuits and gratifications of the woman, the wife and mother, than of the young girl.

The Queen added that the only one who was f.a.gged was the Prince, and that from business and not pleasure, a result which made her often anxious and unhappy. Indeed, this suspicion of precarious health on Prince Albert's part was the cloud the size of a man's hand that kept hovering on the horizon in the summer sky.

Parliament was prorogued and dissolved at the same time at an unusually early date, the first of July, so that the season itself came to a speedy end.

Before the Queen left London, she was present at the baptism and stood sponsor for the young Hindoo Princess Gouromma, the pale, dark, slender girl whose picture looks down on the visitor at Buckingham Palace. She had been brought to England by her father, the Rajah of Coorg, a high-caste Hindoo, who desired that she should be brought up a Christian. He was one of the princes of Northern India, whose inheritance had become a British possession. He lived at Benares under the control of the East India Company, and had an allowance from Government as well as a large private fortune. The little princess was the same age as the Princess Royal, eleven years. She was the daughter of the Rajah's favourite wife, who had died immediately after the infant's birth. The ceremony took place in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury officiated. Besides the Queen, the sponsors were Lady Hardinge, Mr. Drummond, and Sir James Weir Hogg, the chairman of the East India Company. The little girl received the name "Victoria." The Rajah returned soon afterwards to India.

The Court had longer time to enjoy the sea air and quiet of Osborne, where, however, sorrow intruded in the shape of the news of the death of Count Mensdorff, the uncle by marriage both of the Queen and Prince Albert, to whom they were warmly attached. Though he had been no prince, only a French emigrant officer in the Austrian service, when he married the sister of the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, he was held in high esteem by his wife's family for the distinction with which he had served as a soldier, and for his many good qualities.

Princess Hohenlohe, with a son and daughter, came to Osborne as a stage to Scotland and Abergeldie, where she was to visit her mother, the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, and where she could also best enjoy the Queen's society. The poor Princess, who made a stay of several months in this country, had need of a mother's and a sister's sympathy. A heavy sorrow had lately befallen her. The eldest daughter of the Hohenlohe family, Princess Elise, a girl of great promise, had died at Venice of consumption in her twenty-first year.

Yachting excursions were again made to Devons.h.i.+re and Cornwall, to Torquay and the often-visited beauties of Mount Edgc.u.mbe and the banks of the Tamar. There was a proposal of a visit to the King of the Belgians, with the Channel Islands to be touched at on the way. One part of the programme had to be given up, on account of the tempestuous weather. The yacht, after waiting to allow Prince Albert to pay a flying visit--the last--to the Duke of Wellington at Walmer, ran up the Scheldt in one of the pauses in the storm, and the travellers reached Antwerp at seven o'clock on the morning of the 11th of August, "in a hurricane of wind and rain."

But the weather is of little consequence when friends meet. King Leopold was waiting for his welcome guests, and immediately carried them off to his country palace, for their visit this time was to him and not to any of the old Flemish towns.

The Queen and Prince Albert, with their children, stayed at Laeken for three days, returning to Antwerp in time for a visit to the cathedral and the museum, before sailing in the same unpropitious weather for Flus.h.i.+ng. The intention was still to cross on the following morning to the Channel Islands, but the wet, wild weather did not change, and the yacht remained where it was, the Queen indemnifying herself for the disappointment by landing and going over an old Dutch town and a farmhouse, with which she was much pleased.

On the 30th of August the Court went to Balmoral by Edinburgh. Soon after her arrival the Queen had the gratifying intelligence that a large legacy, about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, had been left to her and her heirs by one of her subjects--Mr. Campden Nield-- a gentleman without near relatives, who had lived in the most penurious way, denying himself the very necessaries of life.

The Queen's comment on the bequest to King Leopold was like her. "It is astonis.h.i.+ng, but it is satisfactory to see that people have so much confidence that it will not be thrown away, and so it certainly will not be." Baron Stockmar held with some justice that it was "a monument reared to the Queen during her life, in recognition of her simple, honourable, and const.i.tutional career."

Her Majesty and Prince Albert went on the 16th of September for their customary two days' stay by Loch Muich, though they had been startled in the morning by a newspaper report of the death of the Duke of Wellington at Walmer. But the rumour had arisen so often during these many years that n.o.body believed it, now that it was true.

The little party started in the course of the forenoon on a showery day. Arrived at the Loch, the Queen walked up the side to Alt-na- Dearg, a "burn" and fall, then rode up the ravine hung with birch and mountain-ash, and walked again along the top of the steep hills to points which command a view of Lord Panmure's country, "Mount Keen and the Ogilvie Hills."

A little farther on, while resting and looking down on the Gla.s.salt s.h.i.+el and the head of the loch, the Queen, by a curious coincidence, missed the watch which the Duke of Wellington had given her. Her Majesty sent back a keeper to inquire about her loss; in the meanwhile she walked on and descended by the beautiful falls of the Gla.s.salt, one hundred and fifty feet in height, which she compares to those of the Bruar. The cottage or s.h.i.+el of the Gla.s.salt had just been built for the Queen, and offered accommodation in its dainty little dining- room and drawing-room for her to rest and refresh herself. After she had eaten luncheon, she set out again on a pony, pa.s.sed another waterfall, called the Burn of the Spullan, and reached the wild solitary Dhu Loch.

The Queen had sat down to sketch when the keeper returned to tell her that the watch was safe at home; but that was not all. He brought a letter from Lord Derby with a melancholy confirmation of the report of the morning. The Duke of Wellington was dead. The Queen calls the news "fatal," and with something of the fond exaggeration of a daughter, writes of the dead man as "England's--rather Britannia's--pride, her glory, her hero, the greatest man she ever had produced."

We can understand it, when we remember how closely connected he was with all her previous career, from her cradle till now. He had taken pride in her, advised her, obeyed her, with half a father's, half a servant's devotion. The King of the Belgians was hardly more her second father than the Duke of Wellington had been.

Besides, the Duke was not only a soldier; he had been a statesman, tried and true as far as his vision extended; brave here no less than in the stricken field, honest with an upright man's straightforwardness, wise with a practical man's sense of what could and could not be done, what must be yielded when the time came.

The Queen might well mourn for her grey-bearded captain, her faithful old councillor. There was one comfort, that the Duke had reached a good old age, and died after a few hours illness, without suffering.

He simply fell asleep, and awoke no more in this world. His old antagonist, Marshal Soult, had pre-deceased him only by a few months.

The Queen sums up the position: "One cannot think of this country without 'the Duke,' our immortal hero."

Her Majesty hastened down on foot to the head of Loch Muich, and rode back in the rain to Alt-na-Giuthasach to write to Lord Derby and Lord Charles Wellesley, who had been with his father in his last hours. She wrote mournfully in her journal: "We shall soon stand sadly alone.

Aberdeen is almost the only personal friend of that kind left to us.

Melbourne, Peel, Liverpool, now the Duke, all gone!...."

Invitations were countermanded, and the Court went into mourning. The Queen was right that the sorrow was universal. The s.h.i.+ps in the Thames and in all the English ports had their flags half-mast high, the church bells were tolled, business was done "with the great exchanges half-shuttered," garrison music was forbidden.

The Duke had left no directions with regard to his funeral, and it was fitting that it should receive the highest honour Sovereign and people could pay. But the Queen refrained from issuing an order, preferring that the country should take the initiative. It was necessary to wait till the 11th of November, when Parliament must meet. In the meantime the body of the Duke was placed under a Guard of Honour at Walmer.

Viscount Hardinge was appointed Commander-in-Chief.

The Court left Balmoral on the 12th of October, about a month after the Duke of Wellington's death, and on the 11th--a day which the Queen calls in her journal "a very happy, lucky, and memorable one"--her Majesty and Prince Albert, with their family, household, tenants, servants, and poorer neighbours, ascended Craig Gowan, a hill near Balmoral, for the purpose of building a cairn, which was to commemorate the Queen and the Prince's having taken possession of their home in the north. At the "Moss House," half-way up, the Queen's piper met her, and preceded her, playing as he went. Not the least welcome among the company already collected were the children of the keepers and other retainers, with whom her Majesty was familiar in their own homes. She calls them her "little friends," and enumerates them in a motherly way, "Mary Symons, and Lizzie Stewart, the four Grants, and several others."

The Queen laid the first stone of the cairn, Prince Albert the next.

Their example was followed by the Princes and Princesses, according to their ages, and by the members of the household. Finally every one present "came forward at once, each person carrying a stone and placing it on the cairn." The piper played, whiskey was handed round.

The work of building went on for an hour, during which "some merry reels were danced on a flat stone opposite." All the old people danced, apparently to her Majesty's mingled gratification and diversion. Again the happy mother of seven fine children notices particularly the children and their performance. "Many of the children--Mary Symons and Lizzie Stewart especially--danced so nicely, the latter with her hair all hanging down."

There is another little paragraph which is very characteristic of the love of animals, and the faithful remembrance of old landmarks, well- known features in the Queen's character. "Poor dear old Monk, Sir Robert Gordon's (the former owner of Balmoral) faithful old dog, was sitting there among us all."

When the cairn ("seven or eight feet high") was all but finished, Prince Albert climbed to the top and deposited the last stone, when three cheers were given. The Queen calls it "a gay, pretty, and touching sight," that almost made her cry. "The view was so beautiful over the dear hills; the day so fine, the whole so _gemuthlich_."

She ends reverently, "May G.o.d bless this place, and allow us to see it and enjoy it many a long year."