Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen Volume II Part 23

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

DEATHS OF LORD PALMERSTON AND THE KING OF THE BELGIANS--THE QUEEN AGAIN OPENS PARLIAMENT IN PERSON, &C., &C.

The Prime Minister so long connected with the Queen, Lord Palmerston, energetic to the last, died at Brockett Hall on the 18th of October.

A still greater loss befell her Majesty in the month of December--a marked month in her history. King Leopold died on the 9th at Laeken, within a few days of attaining his seventy-sixth year, the last of a family of nine sons and daughters. He had been cured of a deadly disease by a painful and dangerous operation two years before. He had suffered afterwards from a slight shock of paralysis, which had not prevented him from coming to England to be present at the baptism of Prince Victor of Wales, the fifth generation, counting that of George III., which King Leopold had known in connection with the English throne. In addition to his fine mental qualities, he was singularly active in his habits to the end. He walked thirty miles, and shot for six hours in winter snow, after he had entered his seventy-fifth year.

Though the Queen must have been prepared for the event, and his death was peaceful, it was a blow to her--much of her early past perished with her life-long friend and counsellor.

In 1866 the Queen opened Parliament in person for the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, and there was a great a.s.semblage to hail her reappearance when she entered, not by the State, but by the Peers' entrance. There were none of the flourishes of trumpets which had formerly announced her arrival--solemn silence prevailed. She did not wear the robes of state, they were merely laid upon the throne.

Her Majesty was accompanied by the Princesses Helena and Louise. When the Queen was seated on the throne the Prince of Wales took his seat on her right, while the Princesses stood on her left. Behind the Queen was the d.u.c.h.ess of Wellington, as mistress of the robes, and a lady in waiting. Her Majesty's dress was dark purple velvet bordered with ermine; she wore a tiara of diamonds with a white gauze veil falling down behind. The speech, which in one pa.s.sage announced the coming marriage of Princess Helena and Prince Christian (who sat near the end of one of the amba.s.sadors' benches) was read by the Lord Chancellor.

The Parliament granted to Prince Alfred an annuity of fifteen thousand pounds--voted in turn to each of his younger brothers on their coming of age--and to Princess Helena a dowry of thirty thousand and an annuity of six thousand pounds, similar to what had been granted to Princess Alice and was to be voted to Princess Louise.

In March the Queen inst.i.tuted the "Albert Medal," as a decoration for those who had saved life from s.h.i.+pwreck and from peril at sea, and for the first time during five-years revisited the camp at Aldershot and reviewed the troops. She was accompanied by Princess Helena and the Princess Hohenlohe, who was on a visit to England.

Queen Amelie died at Claremont on the 24th of March, aged eighty-three years.

On the 25th of May Prince Alfred was created Earl of Ulster, Earl of Kent, and Duke of Edinburgh.

The Princess Mary of Cambridge was married to the Prince of Teck on the 12th of June, in the presence of the Queen, in the parish church of Kew, where the bride had been confirmed, "among her own people."

Parliament granted her an annuity of five thousand pounds.

Another marriage, that of Princess Helena, was celebrated in St.

George's Chapel, Windsor, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, on the 7th of July. The bridegroom was supported by Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein and Prince Edward of Saxe- Weimar. The bride entered between her Majesty and the Prince of Wales.

The usual eight n.o.ble bridesmaids followed. Prince Christian was in his thirty-sixth, Princess Helena in her twenty-first year. Their home has been first at Frogmore and afterwards at c.u.mberland Lodge.

While the German war which had Schleswig-Holstein for a bone of contention was still only threatening, the Crown Princess of Prussia lost a fine child, Prince Sigismund.

Afterwards the Queen had the pain of seeing her married children, with their unfailing family affection, inevitably ranged on different sides in the war. Princess Alice trembled before the fear of a widowhood like her mother's as the sound of the firing of the Prussian army, which lay between the wife at home and the husband in the field, was heard in Darmstadt. The quiet little town fell into the hands of the enemy, and was at once poverty and pestilence stricken, small-pox and cholera having broken out in the hospitals, where the Princess was labouring devotedly to succour the wounded. In such circ.u.mstances, while the standard of her husband's regiment lay hidden in her room, Princess Louis's third daughter was both. Happily peace was soon proclaimed. In honour of it the baby, Princess Irene, whose G.o.dfathers were the officers and men of her father's regiment, received her name.

This year Hanover ceased to be an independent state, and became annexed to Prussia.

Dr. Norman Macleod has a bright little picture of an evening at Balmoral in 1866. "The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch wheel while I read Robert Burns to her, 'Tam o' Shanter,' and 'A man's a man for a' that'--her favourite."

Her Majesty sent her miniature with an autograph letter to the American citizen, Mr. Peabody, in acknowledgment of his magnificent gift of model lodging-houses to the Working people of London.

In 1867 the Queen again opened Parliament in person, her speech being read by the Lord Chancellor.

The grievous accident of the breaking of the ice in Regent's Park, when it was covered with skaters and spectators, took place on the 15th of January.

"The Early Tears of the Prince Consort," the first instalment of his "Life," brought out under the direction of General Grey, with much of the information supplied by the Queen, was published, and afforded a n.o.bler memorial to the Prince than any work in stone or metal.

On the 20th of May her Majesty laid the foundation of the Albert Hall.

She was accompanied by the Princesses Louise and Beatrice, Prince Leopold, and Prince Christian, and received by the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain, and the Queen's elder sons. The latter presented her with a bouquet, which she took, kissing her sons. In reply to the Prince of Wales's speech her Majesty spoke in accents singularly inaudible for her. She mentioned the struggle she had undergone before she had brought herself to take part in that day's proceedings, but said she had been sustained by the thought that she was thus promoting her husband's designs.

In June and July the Queen of Prussia and the Sultan of Turkey came in turn to England. The latter was with her Majesty in her yacht at a great naval review held in most tempestuous weather off Spithead. In the end of July the Empress of the French paid a short private visit to her Majesty at Osborne.

On the 20th of August the Queen left for Balmoral. On her way north she spent a few days with the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Roxburgh at Fleurs, when her Majesty visited Melrose and Abbotsford. After inspecting with great interest the memorials of Sir Walter Scott, who had been presented to her when she was a little girl at Kensington Palace, she complied with a request that she should write her name in the great author's journal, adding the modest comment in her own journal that she felt it presumption in her to do so.

During the autumn the Queen paid an informal visit to the Duke of Richmond's shooting lodge in Glen Fiddich. On the first evening of her stay the break with the luggage failed to appear, and her Majesty had to suffer some of the half-comical inconveniences of ordinary travellers. She had to dine in her riding skirt, with a borrowed black lace veil arranged as a head-dress, and she had to go to bed without the necessary accompaniments to her toilette.

In 1867 the terrible news from Mexico that the Emperor Maximilian (Archduke of Austria and husband of the Queen's cousin, Princess Charlotte of Belgium) had been shot by his rebel subjects, while his wife was hopelessly insane, rendered it a mercy to all interested in the family that old King Leopold had not lived to see the wreck of so many hopes.

In 1868 the Queen gave to her people the first "Leaves" from her journal in the Highlands, which afforded most pleasant glimpses of the wonderfully happy family life, the chief holidays of which had been spent at Balmoral. Her Majesty sent a copy to Charles d.i.c.kens, with the graceful inscription that it was the gift of "one of the humblest of writers to one of the greatest."

On the 13th of May the Queen laid the foundation stone of St. Thomas's Hospital, and on the 20th she held a great review of twenty-seven thousand volunteers in Windsor Park. Instead of her mother or her little children, her daughter-in-law and grown-up daughters, the Princess of Wales, Princess Christian, and Princess Louise, were in the carriage with her, while in room of her husband and her brother or cousin, her two soldier sons rode one on each side of the carriage.

On the 5th of July her Majesty, whose health required change of air and scene, left for Switzerland, which must have possessed a great attraction to so ardent an admirer of mountain scenery. She went incognito as Countess of Kent. She was accompanied by Prince Leopold and the Princesses Louise and Beatrice. The Queen travelled in her yacht to Cherbourg, and thence by railway to Paris, where she stayed all day in seclusion in the house of the English Amba.s.sador, receiving only a private visit from the Empress Eugenie--a different experience of Paris from the last. The Queen continued her journey in the evening to Basle, and from Basle to Lucerne, where for nearly two months she occupied the Pension Wallis, delightfully situated on the Hill Gibraltar above the lake. She made numerous enjoyable excursions on her pony "Sultan" to the top of the Rhigi, and in the little steamboat _Winkelried_ on the lovely lake of the Four Cantons, under the shadow of Pilatus, to William Tell's country--she even ventured as far as the desolate, snow-crowned precipices of the Engelberg. Her Majesty returned by Paris, driving out to St. Cloud, and being much affected as she walked in the grounds, but not venturing to enter the house, where she had lived with the Prince during her happy fortnight's visit to her ally in the Crimean war.

Three days after her arrival in England the Queen proceeded as usual to Balmoral, where she took a lively interest in all the rural and domestic affairs which stood out prominently in the lives of her humbler neighbours. The pa.s.sages from her journal in this and in subsequent years are full of graphic, appreciative descriptions of the stirring incidents of "sheep-juicing," "sheep-shearing," the torchlight procession on "Hallowe'en," a "house-warming;" of the grave solemnity of a Scotch communion, and the kindliness and pathos of more than one cottage "kirstenin," death-bed, and funeral, with the simple piteous tragedy of "a spate" in which two little brothers were drowned.

Considerable excitement was caused in the House of Commons during the debate on the disestablishment of the Irish Church, by the Premier, Mr. Disraeli, mentioning the Queen's name in connection with an interview he had with her on his resignation of office and on the dissolution of Parliament. The conduct of Mr. Disraeli was stigmatised as unconst.i.tutional both in advising a dissolution of Parliament and in apparently attempting to s.h.i.+ft the responsibility of the situation from the Government to the Crown.

The Queen lost by death this year her old Mistress of the Robes, one of the earliest and most attached of her friends, Harriet, d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland.

In September, 1869, her Majesty, with the Princesses Louise and Beatrice, paid a ten days' visit to Invertrosachs, occupying Lady Emily Macnaghten's house, and learning to know by heart Loch Katrine, Loch Lomond, &c., &c.

In November the Queen was in the City after a long absence, for the double purpose of opening Blackfriars Bridge and the Holborn Viaduct.

Happily for the cheering mult.i.tudes congregated on the occasion the day was bright and fair though cold, so that she could drive in an open carriage accompanied by her younger daughters and Prince Leopold.

The Queen still wore deep mourning after eight years of widowhood, and her servants continued to have a band of c.r.a.pe on one arm. Her Majesty was received by the Lord Mayor, &c., &c. After Blackfriars Bridge had been declared open for traffic her carriage pa.s.sed across it, followed by his. The same ceremony was performed at the Holborn Viaduct.

This season the Prince of Wales revisited the East, accompanied by the Princess.

In 1870 the Queen signed the order in council resigning the royal prerogative over the army.

On the 11th May her Majesty opened the University of London. She was received by Earl Granville and Mr. Grote. Baboo Keshub Shunder Sen was conspicuous among the company. The Queen received an address, said in a clear voice "I declare this building open," and the silver trumpets sounded.

Charles d.i.c.kens died on the 9th of June.

The Franco-German war, in which the Crown Prince of Prussia and Prince Louis of Hesse were both engaged with honour, happily this time on the same side, was filling the eyes of Europe; and before many months had pa.s.sed since "_Die Wacht am Rhein_" had resounded through the length and breadth of Germany, the Empress of the French arrived in England as a fugitive, to be followed ere long by the Emperor.

In the autumn at Balmoral, Princess Louise, with the Queen's consent, became engaged to the Marquis of Lorne, eldest son of the Duke of Argyle. The proposal was made and accepted during a walk from the Gla.s.salt s.h.i.+el to the Dhu Loch.

In November the Queen visited the Empress at Chislehurst.

During the war, while the number of the French wounded alone in Darmstadt amounted to twelve hundred, and Princess Alice was visiting the four hospitals daily, her second son was born.

The death of Sir James Clark, at Bagshot, was the snapping to the Queen of another of the links which connected the present with the past.

In 1871 the Queen again opened Parliament in person, with her speech read by the Lord Chancellor. As described by an eye-witness, her Majesty sat "quite still, her eyes cast down, only a slight movement of the face." The approaching marriage of the Princess Louise was announced, and reference was made to the fact that the King of Prussia had become Emperor of Germany.

For the first time since the death of the Prince Consort, the Queen spent the anniversary of their marriage-day at Windsor.

On the 21st of March Princess Louise was married in St George's Chapel, Windsor, to the Marquis of Lorne. The bridegroom was supported by Earl Percy and Lord Ronald Leveson-Gower. The bride walked between the Queen and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Her Majesty by a gesture gave away her daughter. Princess Louise was twenty-three, Lord Lorne twenty-six years of age. The Princess has rooms in Kensington Palace for her London residence.

Eight days afterwards the Queen opened the Albert Hall.