It was when the country was passing through the crisis of Palmerston’s “penal dissolution” that a Princess was added to the Royal circle—soon to be diminished by the migration of her eldest sister to a home of her own in a foreign land. The little Princess was born on the 14th of April, and in a letter to King Leopold the Queen says: “She is to be called Beatrice, a fine old name borne by three of the Plantagenet Princesses, and her other names will be Mary (after poor Aunt Mary), Victoria (after Mama and Vicky, who, with Fritz Wilhelm, are to be the sponsors) and Feodore.”[355] On the 19th Prince Albert tells his stepmother that the Queen was already able to leave her room, and her recovery, therefore, could not have been retarded by the political excitement and agitation of the times.

As the month ended, however, sorrow fell on the Royal household. On the 30th of April the Duchess of Gloucester died—the “Aunt Gloucester” to whom the Queen and her husband in their letters make so many affectionate references. This Princess was the last child of George III., and of all his family the best beloved. The story of her life was in itself a romance, the pathos of which accounts for the Queen’s frequent allusions to her nobility and unselfishness of character. During her girlhood at Windsor the Princess Mary, as she was called, won the hearts of the people by her quiet, unobtrusive philanthropic work among the poor. She and her cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, fell in love with each other, but when he attained the age of twenty-one their romance was cruelly and abruptly ended. The Princess Charlotte was born, and it was decreed that the Duke of Gloucester must remain single, so that he might marry her if no eligible foreign prince claimed her hand. The Princess Mary and the Duke of Gloucester waited in suspense for twenty weary years—for she refused to encourage any other suitor. In 1814 a rift appeared in this cloud that overhung their lives. The Prince of Orange, it was said, was about to wed the Princess Charlotte, and the ladies of the Court noticed how the pining Princess Mary suddenly began to look bright and happy. But the projected alliance with the Prince of Orange was abandoned, and the Princess Mary began to droop again. A few months, however, put an end to the long probation of the Royal lovers. Leopold of Coburg married the Princess Charlotte, and Court gossips chronicle the fact that when she came down the steps of Carlton House after the ceremony, the Princess Mary rushed forward and fell weeping into her arms. She was married to the Duke of Gloucester in 1816, and it may be noticed that they refused to ask Parliament for any increase of income. During their lives they had devoted themselves to benevolent work, and had not only learned the value of money, but how to make their means serve their wants. Their married life was so arranged that they not only lived on their private incomes, but won a great and well-merited reputation for their wide and generous charity. The sweet and gentle nature of the Duchess, to which the strange story of her life imparted an additional charm, had ever a strong fascination for the Queen.

The triumph of Palmerston at the General Election had an immediate effect upon those Franco-Russian intrigues for the settlement of the Danubian Principalities which had given the Queen some uneasiness. The approaching visit of the Grand Duke Constantine to Paris had been commented on severely by the English press, and the Emperor of the French, in writing to the Queen to congratulate her on the birth of the Princess Beatrice, attempted to explain away the significance of the visit. Lord Clarendon suggested that Prince Albert should reply to this letter, telling the Emperor quite frankly why England was jealous of the advances of Russia to France. An alliance between France and England, said the Prince in his letter, could have no basis save the mutual desire to develop as much as possible Art, Science, Letters, Commerce—in a word, everything that is meant by Civilisation. But as for an alliance with Russia, on what basis could that be raised? What interest had Russia in Progress? What was there in common between modern France and modern Russia? A Franco-Russian alliance, therefore, could have no foundation but that of political interest—and hence the prospect of it alarmed the free States of Europe.

Prince Albert’s reception at Manchester, where he opened the great Art Treasures Exhibition on the 5th of May, delighted the Queen. But of all the incidents of his tour, perhaps none pleased her more than the manner in which his speech at the unveiling of her statue in the Peel Park of that city was criticised by the public. In his address he alluded to the devotion of the people to their Queen, and spoke of it as the outcome of their attachment to the Sovereign “as the representative of the institutions of the country.” The phrase struck the popular fancy, and to the Queen it seemed the formula of her position and her life. Two days later the Court removed to Osborne, where the Queen gradually recovered from the depression of spirits under which she had sunk after the death of the Duchess of Gloucester.

On the 16th of May the Prussian Official Gazette announced the forthcoming marriage of the Princess Royal and Prince Frederick William, and on the 19th the same announcement was made to Parliament by a Royal Message. In this Message the Queen expressed her confidence that the nation would make a suitable provision for her eldest daughter, and it is worth recording that at the outset the Cabinet were a little uncertain as to the reception which such a Message would meet with. Perhaps that was why Lord Palmerston, in moving the Address in reply to it, took pains to tell Parliament that, quite apart from the personal interest which Englishmen felt in this affair, it held out political prospects “not undeserving the attention of the House.” Family alliances tended, he argued, to mitigate the asperities which from time to time spring from diversities of national interests. “Therefore,” he added, “I trust that this marriage may also be considered as holding out an increased prospect of goodwill and of cordiality among the Great Powers of Europe.”

But in those days the Representatives of the people, were more jealous guardians of the public purse than they are now, and on both sides of the House there was a strong feeling against increasing public expenditure. The competition then was in economy—not as now in profuse extravagance. There were three views current on the subject. One was that of Prince Albert, who thought that the time had come when Parliament should settle finally what provision ought to be made for members of the Royal Family on their marriage, so as to avoid the necessity of frequent eleemosynary appeals to Parliament. He held, and as it now seems rightly, that the feeling of the country at the time ran in favour of treating the Queen’s children generously. In one of his letters to Baron Stockmar he says, “Seeing how marked was the desire to keep questions relating to the Royal Family aloof from the pressure of party conflict, and to have them settled, I believe it would have been an easy matter to have carried through the future endowments of them all, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s and Palmerston’s original plan, which was subsequently dropped by the Cabinet.”[356] Then there was the Ministerial view, which was that the Princess should be voted a dowry and an annuity; and the Radical view, which was that the nation should not be burdened with an annuity, but that whatever was voted to the lady should be a lump sum, so that when the vote was passed the Princess would cease to be a yearly charge on the country she was leaving. Mr. Roebuck gave expression to this last view, even before the Chancellor of the Exchequer laid his proposal before the House—which was that the annuity should be £8,000, and the marriage portion £40,000. The majority of the House, however, desired to come to a unanimous vote on the subject, and they laughed at Sir George Lewis’s grave citations from Blackstone and his precedents from the reign of George II. Still more

heartily did they laugh when he explained how the Queen had recently been forced to bear very large expenses of a public nature, alluding particularly to the visit to the Emperor Napoleon—“a visit,” said Sir George, solemnly, “which was purely for public and State purposes, and not for her individual pleasure.”[357] No doubt the visits of George IV. to Hanover, Ireland, and Scotland were paid for by the State. But it was as ridiculous to cite such a bad precedent as that, as to go back for others to the reign of George III., when Parliament at different times voted a total sum of £3,297,000 to pay the debts of the Royal Family. The truth is, that the Sovereign cannot be held exempt from the ordinary liabilities of exalted rank and station. Every person who accepts a high public office is in the habit, now and then, of drawing on his private income to enable him to discharge his public duties with greater efficiency—in fact, this liability is simply one of the incidents of great estate in every aristocratic country. But, unfortunately, the Queen had on her accession surrendered her Crown revenues to Parliament for a fixed annuity, on the more or less formal understanding that Parliament would provide for her children when they settled in life. So that the House of Commons felt there was really no choice in the matter, save to vote the grant, and if possible, out of respect for the Queen, vote it unanimously. Mr. Roebuck withdrew his opposition, but on the report of the vote in Supply, Mr. Coningham, Member for Brighton, entered a protest against the principle of voting annuities to the Royal Family, and moved the reduction of the vote in this instance from £8,000 to £6,000 a year. The motion was lost by 328 to 14. Mr. Maguire and Sir J. Trelawny, supported by Mr. Coningham, then argued that the annuity was enough, and moved that there be no dowry granted. They were beaten by a vote of 361 to 18, and here the matter ended. “We have,” writes Prince Albert to Stockmar, “established a good precedent, not merely for the grant itself, but for the way and manner in which such grants should be dealt with.”[358] This opinion he would perhaps have recast had he lived to see the painful position in which the Royal Family have again and again been placed by repeated applications of the precedent.

Just before the Court left Osborne, the Grand Duke Constantine paid the Queen his long expected visit. He arrived on the 30th and left next night, after going with her Majesty to see the fleet at Spithead. His visit was not quite a pleasant one for the Queen and Lord Palmerston. The Grand Duke, to their surprise, spoke with almost cynical candour of the Crimean War; indeed, it was not till his visit that the Queen had brought home to her effectually the murderous mistakes of that campaign. He told her about Menschikoff’s blundering, and showed her how Sebastopol was at the mercy of the Allies after the Battle of the Alma, because there were only two battalions in the city; and further indulged in many cheering reminiscences of a similar sort, especially in reference to the attacks on the Redan. But as he had just come from Paris, one wonders if he told his English hosts how it was that the Emperor discovered that the Malakoff was the weak point in the defences of the town.[359] On the 3rd of June the Court returned to Windsor, and the Queen went to Ascot Races, and admired the beautiful mare, Blink Bonny, which was brought out for her inspection.[360] The first Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, however, provided a stronger attraction than Ascot for the Queen and her husband, and her visit to it is described in glowing terms by contemporary chroniclers. It was the precursor of these great festivals which have since become world-famous, and on the 17th, when the Queen was present, Judas Maccabæus was given by 2,500 performers.

The christening of the Princess Beatrice took place in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on the 16th of June, and among the visitors and guests the Archduke Maximilian of Austria was one of the most prominent. He had become betrothed to the Princess Charlotte of Belgium, a young and beautiful princess, to whom the Queen was deeply attached. It was a love match, but the lives of the young people, radiant at the outset with sunshine, were darkened at the end by the gloom of an awful tragedy. In an evil moment the Archduke permitted the French Emperor to lure him into his wild project for establishing a Transatlantic-Latin Empire as a counterpoise to the Anglo-Saxon Republic of the West. He was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1863, and deposed and shot by order of the President of the Mexican Republic in 1867. His unhappy consort passed the rest of her existence in the living death of insanity.

On the 25th of June the Queen conferred on her husband, by Royal Letters Patent, the title of Prince Consort, which, however, had already been given to him by the people, who never called him anything else. Still it had been a popular, not a legal title, and Prince Albert could claim no other precedence than what was accorded to him by courtesy. Moreover, when he went abroad, although he held a kingly position in England, he ranked merely as a younger Prince of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and foreigners raised difficulties about the precedence that should be given to him. “I should have preferred its being done by Act of Parliament,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold, in reference to the legalising of the new title, “and so it may still be at some future period; but it was thought better on the whole to do it now in this simple way”—namely, by Letters Patent.

On the 26th, her Majesty presided over one of the most interesting functions of her reign—the first distribution of the Victoria Cross, or Cross of Valour, to the men who had earned it by personal prowess in war. It is a curious fact that till this period no English sovereign ever decorated an Englishman for being brave. Courage in England is so common and cheap, said Mr. Bright once, that it can be bought easily for less than a shilling a day. Nay, there were some generals, like Colin Campbell, who objected strongly to decorations being conferred for valour—because, as Campbell said, you might as well decorate a woman for being chaste as an English soldier for being brave.[361] But contact with the French Army had altered the old-fashioned English ideas on the subject,

and the spectacle of private soldiers in the Crimea wearing the Legion of Honour on their breasts had created a feeling in favour of some kind of decoration which would be open to all ranks of the army. The Order of the Bath could not be granted for mere bravery—it was granted for bravery combined with exceptional skill and talent. But then, as the private soldier had no chance of displaying any quality in war save courage, it was obvious that the new Order must seek a basis in individual heroism alone. The Queen, struck by the episodical incidents of the Crimean War, was strongly of opinion in 1856 that exceptional deeds of personal valour should have more distinctive recognition than the war medal which every man received, however slight might have been his share in the campaign. In that year, therefore, she instituted, by the Royal Warrant of January 29th, 1856, the Order of the Victoria Cross. The decoration was to be given to soldiers or sailors who had performed some signal act of valour or devotion to their country in face of the enemy—and a small pension of £10 a year was to be attached to the Cross. It was not until late in 1857 that a list of persons qualified for admission to the Order could be drawn up, and when it was submitted to the Queen she resolved to decorate them with her own hands. Public interest in the ceremony on the 26th of June was intense. At an early hour crowds of well-dressed sightseers swarmed into Hyde Park, where a vast amphitheatre of seats, capable of accommodating 12,000 persons had been erected. In the centre stood a simple table, on which were laid the bronze Maltese crosses—their red and blue ribbons being the only patches of colour that caught the eye. In front, a body of 4,000 troops, consisting of the corps d’élite of the army—Guards, Highlanders, Royal Marines, the Rifle Brigade, Enniskillens, and Hussars, Artillery and Engineers—was drawn up. Between them and the Royal Pavilion stood the small group of heroes—sixty-two in number—who were to be decorated. At 10 a.m. the Queen, the Prince Consort, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and a brilliant train, rode into the Park. The Queen, mounted on a gallant and spirited roan, and wearing a scarlet jacket, black skirt, and plumed hat, rode up to the table, but did not dismount. One by one each hero was summoned to her presence, and bending from her saddle, her Majesty

pinned the Cross on his breast with her own hands, whilst the Prince Consort saluted him with grave and respectful courtesy. As each soldier or sailor was decorated, the vast concourse of spectators cheered and clapped their hands—whether he were an officer whose breast was already glittering with stars and orders, or a humble private or Jack Tar whose rough tunic carried no more resplendent embellishment than the ordinary war medal. But of all the cheers none were heartier than those which were given for a man who, when called out, stepped forward arrayed in what was then the grotesque and pacific garb of an ordinary policeman.

The Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, which had been opened in May by the Prince Consort, had become amazingly popular. It was the first of its kind seen in England, and the great difficulty which its organisers had to overcome was the reluctance of private collectors to lend works of art for exhibition. But for the Queen and Prince Albert it is probable this obstacle would never have been surmounted,[362] and hence it was but natural that her Majesty should desire to visit the collection. Her reception at Manchester, on the 30th of June, was enthusiastic, a crowd of a million people welcoming her, as she said herself, with “kind and friendly faces.” The display of Prussian flags, and the complimentary allusions to her husband and to her eldest daughter’s approaching marriage, appear to have touched her deeply. At the Exhibition, her Majesty knighted the Mayor, as she observes, “with Sir Harry Smith’s sword, which had been in four general actions,” and on the 2nd of July she left for Buckingham Palace, where she gave a great musical party in the evening. The next event of importance in the home-life of the Queen was the departure of the Prince of Wales to Königswinter, where it had been arranged he was to carry on his studies. He left in high spirits, and with the Queen’s anxious adieus, on the 26th of July, accompanied by young Mr. Frederick Stanley—now Lord Stanley of Preston—General Grey, Sir H. Ponsonby, and his tutors. Mr. Gladstone’s son, Mr. C. Wood, son of Lord Halifax, and the present Lord Cadogan, were also selected by the Queen and Prince Consort to join him as companions in his studies.

From this time till the tide of war in India turned in our favour, the Queen’s attention seems to have been absorbed by the crisis in our Eastern Empire. Her political work was apparently concentrated in a persistent effort to induce the Cabinet not only to hurry out reinforcements, but to replace them by increasing the establishment at home up to the full limit voted by Parliament, and for which estimates had been taken. Lord Palmerston, on the other hand, in his light and airy way, refused to regard the Mutiny as serious, and persisted in sending out reinforcements in driblets, and then replacing them by driblets of recruits. The Queen very sensibly contended that the force absorbed by the Indian demand should “be replaced to its full extent and in the same kind,” whereas the Cabinet was replacing whole battalions by “handfuls of recruits added to the remaining ones.” It was in vain that the Minister met her with the usual stock platitudes—that neither the money nor the men could be got. The Queen replied that her project would actually be more economical than the confused and unmethodical devices of Palmerston and Panmure. The East India Company would find the money for the reinforcements, which could be applied to the creation of new battalions. But these could in turn absorb the old half-pay officers reduced from the War Establishment, who would then cease to be a burden on the Exchequer. As to the argument that the men could not be got, the Queen wrote to Lord Palmerston, “This is an hypothesis, and not an argument. Try, and you will see. If you do not succeed, and the measure is necessary, you will have to adopt means to make it succeed. If you conjure up the difficulties yourself you cannot, of course, succeed.” One fact may be mentioned as curiously illustrating the shallowness of understanding and feebleness of grasp with which Palmerston approached any great question of State to which Foreign Office formulæ could not be applied. He, or some one at his instigation, seems to have tried to frighten the Queen by warning her that the East India Company would object to keep up such a large addition to her army in India. The Queen, however, saw what Palmerston could not see—that the first shot fired in the rebellion had virtually eliminated the Company as a dominating factor in the Indian problem. “The Queen,” she writes to Palmerston, “thinks it next to impossible that the European force could again be decreased in India. After the present fearful experience the Company could only send back (home) Queen’s regiments, in order to raise new European ones of their own. This they cannot do without the Queen’s sanction, and she must at once make her most solemn protest against such a measure. It would be dangerous and unconstitutional to allow private individuals to raise an army of Queen’s subjects larger than her own in any part of the British dominions.” And at the close of the Memorandum, which she haughtily desires Palmerston to communicate to his colleagues, the tone becomes sharper as she sums up the net result of the bungling military policy of the Cabinet. “The present situation of the Queen’s army,” she writes, “is a pitiable one. The Queen has just seen, in the camp at Aldershot, regiments which, after eighteen years’ foreign service in most trying climates, had come back to England to be sent out, after seven months, to the Crimea. Having passed through this destructive campaign, they had not been home for a year before they are to go to India for perhaps twenty years! This is most cruel and unfair to the gallant men who devote their services to the country, and the Government is in duty and humanity bound to alleviate their position.”[363]

In August a flying visit to Cherbourg in her yacht convinced the Queen that the growing strength of this port as a place of arms was dangerous to England, and on her return she called the attention of the Cabinet to what she had seen, and demanded reports as to the precise state of the defences on the South coast of England. As usual, nobody could find the required information, and when it was obtained Lord Clarendon told the Prince Consort that nobody could read such an account of our shortcomings without immediately desiring to remedy them. September saw the Court at Balmoral, where the Queen’s holiday was sadly overcast by the Indian reports which came pouring in. As the Prince Consort said, in one of his letters to Stockmar, they were “tortured by the events in India, which are truly frightful!” The French Emperor’s courteous offer to pass our reinforcements through France brought some cheerfulness to the anxious Sovereign, not diminished by the friendly offer of two regiments from Belgium—which was, however, rejected by Lord Palmerston, who had sense enough to see that if England was to win at all she must, as he said, “win off her own bat.”

On the 16th of October the Court returned to Windsor, the Queen having spent a night at Haddo House, where she went to visit her venerable friend, Lord Aberdeen. The sudden death of the Duchess of Nemours, first cousin of the Queen and Prince Consort, and wife of the second son of Louis Philippe, now threw the Court into mourning. “We were like sisters,” wrote Her Majesty to King Leopold, “bore the same name, married the same year, our children are the same age; there was, in short, a similarity between us, which, since 1839, united us closely and tenderly. Now one of us is gone—passed as a rose, full-blown and faded—from this earth to eternity, there to rest in peace and joy.”[364] The commercial crisis of November caused Parliament to be summoned before the year closed, and December was spent in making preparations for the marriage of the Princess Royal.

When the 19th of January, 1858, came round Buckingham Palace was full of guests—the King of the Belgians and his sons, the Prince and Princess of Prussia and their suites, being among the number. It was a brilliant scene of bustle and excitement, covers for eighty or ninety guests being laid daily at dinner. Four dramatic representations were given by command at Her Majesty’s Theatre, where, writes the Queen, “We made a wonderful row of royalties, I sitting between dear uncle and the Prince of Prussia,” and where the audience cheered the young couple who were to be so soon united with a cordiality that brought tears to their parents’ eyes. Balls, dinners, musical parties, celebrated the coming event at the Palace, till the 24th, which is recorded in the Queen’s Diary as “poor dear Vicky’s last unmarried day ... an eventful one, reminding me of my own.” Charming in its simplicity is the Queen’s description of the family delight over the wedding gifts; and the tearful “Good-night” of the 24th between the Princess and her parents is too sacred a subject for more than passing allusion. On the 25th, the eventful day of the wedding, the Queen writes, “I felt as if I were being married over again myself, only much more nervous, for I had not that blessed feeling which I had then, which raises and supports one, of giving myself up for life to him whom I loved and worshipped—then and for ever.” But the sun shone with happy omen as the morning advanced, and the wedding party, amidst cheering crowds, proceeded to the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace.

This interesting building had been put to strange uses in its time. It had been in turn a Roman Catholic chapel, a Protestant chapel, a guard-room, and a store-room, before it ended as a chapel reserved for Royal nuptials. Within its walls Queen Anne had married good-natured George of Denmark, and George III. the shrew of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It was the scene of the wedding of the ill-fated Caroline of Brunswick and the “First Gentleman of Europe,” who, it may be remembered, had to be fortified with brandy ere he could undergo the ceremony. Here, also, William IV. wedded the amiable and gentle Queen Adelaide, and his successor plighted her troth to the husband of her heart. But not even on that occasion was the chapel the scene of a more brilliant pageant than when it witnessed the nuptials of the Princess Royal of England and the son of the Prince of Prussia. The dingy edifice, which Holbein’s admirers revere as a triumph of his genius, was now no longer dingy. Hangings of crimson silk, gleaming with gold fringe and tassels, gilded columns and scroll work, gold headings, and emblazoned shields and ciphers, dispelled the customary gloom from the building. The altar, too, was sumptuously equipped with quaint “services” of gold plate, illustrative of the Augustan age of English Art.

The marriage procession was formed at Buckingham Palace. It consisted of more than twenty carriages, the first detachment of which conveyed the Princes and magnates of the House of Prussia. At a short interval the bridegroom and his suite followed; then the Queen and her family. When it arrived at St. James’s Palace the procession was received by the great officers of State, who conducted it to the chapel through the splendid apartments, rich in sombre decorations of Queen Anne’s reign.

The Prince Consort and King Leopold were radiant in the bravery of Field Marshals’ uniforms, “the three girls,” writes the Queen, with quick feminine memory for the details of such an occasion, “in pink satin trimmed with Newport lace, Alice with a wreath, and the two others only with bouquets in their hair of cornflowers and marguerites; next the four boys in Highland dress.” As for the eight bridesmaids, they “looked charming in white tulle, with wreaths and bouquets of pink roses and white heather;” and “Mama” (the Duchess of Kent) “looking so handsome,” says the Queen, “in violet velvet trimmed with ermine and white silk and violet,” with “the Cambridges” and all the foreign Princes and Princesses, made up a brilliant party. The wedding procession was, in fact, formed in the Closet—the room in the Chapel which on Court days is reserved for the Royal Family and the families of Peers, “just as at my marriage,” writes the Queen, “only how small the old Royal Family has become!” Lord Palmerston carried the Sword of State “with easy grace and dignity,” says the Morning Post,[365] “with a ponderous solemnity,” says the Times, in their respective accounts of the scene, and the Queen, with the “two little boys” on each side, and followed by her three daughters, walked after Lord Palmerston and the two elder Princes. Amidst

beating drums and blaring trumpets, the procession entered the Chapel, the appearance of the Queen crowned with a glittering diadem, being greeted with a profound and reverential obeisance by the wedding guests as she swept on to her chair of State on the left of the altar. The entrance of the bride with her father and King Leopold sent a flutter of excitement through the throng. When the Princess appeared her face seemed pale, even in contrast with her snowy robe of rich moire antique. She passed the Queen with a deep bow, and as her eyes met those of the bridegroom, her cheeks suddenly flushed to deepest crimson. “My last fear of being overcome,” writes the Queen, “vanished on seeing Vicky’s quiet, calm, and composed manner.” The whole scene indeed recalled her own marriage, and her eyes glistened with tears as the sweet memories of her happy and busy life flitted through her mind. The ceremony was performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Oxford, and Chester. The Archbishop was “very nervous,” however—much more so than either bride or bridegroom, and the Queen records that he omitted some of the passages in the Service. When the ceremony was over, tender and affectionate congratulations passed between the married pair and their relations. The bride and her mother fell weeping into each other’s arms, and for a minute or so their agitation was manifestly beyond their control. The bridegroom then kissed the bride, who, escaping from his embrace, threw herself into the arms of her father, whom she kissed again and again. The Princess of Prussia embraced her son and kissed the Queen most affectionately; but the most touching greeting of all was that which passed between the bridegroom and his father, who seemed quite unnerved with emotion. The Prince clasped his father passionately to his heart, and then, as if recovering self-control, suddenly knelt down and reverently kissed his hand. These congratulations were repeated when the register was signed by all the Princesses and Princes present, including the Maharajah Duleep Sing. Through cheering crowds bride and bridegroom and the splendid train of wedding guests proceeded to Buckingham Palace, where the wedded pair and their parents appeared on the balcony and bowed their thanks to the kindly people who stood huzzaing outside. Then came the breakfast and the parting, which is “such sweet sorrow” to mother and daughter on such occasions. The married couple drove to Windsor, and at the railway station were met by the Eton boys, who dragged their carriage all the way to the Castle. London was one blaze of illuminations that night, and the rejoicings at the Palace closed with a State concert. Nothing pleased the Queen more than the demeanour of the populace. Their demonstrations of loyalty were purely spontaneous and utterly unaffected. So much was this the case that the foreign guests were amazed to find that the Government offices were the only buildings which were not illuminated; in fact, their gloomy darkness alone rendered the general illumination of London a little less brilliant than that which celebrated the Proclamation of Peace with Russia.

On the 27th of January the Court removed to Windsor, where Prince Frederick William was invested with the Order of the Garter, and a dinner-party followed, at which the Duke of Buccleuch gratified the Princess with his reports of the enthusiastic loyalty of the crowds in London, among whom he had moved about incognito on the night of the wedding ceremony. Next day the whole family returned to London, and in the evening went to see Sheridan’s Rivals and the Spitalfields Weaver at Her Majesty’s Theatre, the Queen being greatly amused, as she herself records, by the drolleries of Wright, the low comedian, in the latter piece. On the 30th loyal addresses from the City of London and all the great towns came pouring in, and what the Prince Consort calls “a monster Drawing-Room” was held. On Monday the 1st of February the Queen writes in her Diary, “The last day of our dear child being with us, which is incredible, and makes me at times feel sick at heart,”[366] and when the next day came round the Queen’s fortitude failed her. Mother and daughter sat weeping in each other’s arms, and when the “dreadful time,” as the Queen calls it, arrived, and they had to go down into the Hall, filled with weeping friends and sad-eyed servants, the scene was touching in the extreme. “Poor dear child,” writes the Queen, “I clasped her in my arms and blessed her, and knew not what to say. I kissed good Fritz, and pressed his hand again and again. He was unable to speak, and the tears were in his eyes.” But the final parting could be postponed no longer, and the Queen returned to her room in sorrow. Instead of driving from Buckingham Palace to the Bricklayers’ Arms Station by the shortest route, the Prince and Princess drove along the Strand, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and London Bridge. The houses and shops were profusely decked with flags, though the decorations were got ready in a hurry. The day was bitterly cold, and snow fell fast. Yet the inclement weather did not deter vast crowds from turning out to bid the newly-married pair “Good speed.” When the Prince Consort, who had accompanied his daughter and son-in-law part of the way, returned home, the Queen’s grief broke out again. Even the sight of “the darling baby” (Princess Beatrice) saddened her, for, as she writes, “Dear Vicky loved her so much, and only yesterday played with her.” As for the Prince Consort, he told the Princess, in one of his letters, that the void she had left was not in his heart only, but in his daily life. In fact, nothing save the cordial and brilliant reception which welcomed her in Germany could have consoled him for the loss of a daughter whom he proudly described to her husband as one who “had a man’s head and a child’s heart.”