Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II

On the 29th of November the Queen went on one of her visits to her nobility. We are told, and we can easily believe, these visits were very popular and eagerly contested for. In her Majesty's choice of localities it would seem as if she loved sometimes to retrace her early footsteps by going again with her husband to the places where she had been, as the young Princess, with the Duchess of Kent. The Queen went at this time to Burghley, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter.

The tenantry of the different noblemen whose lands she passed through lined the roads, the mayors of the various towns presented addresses, the school children sang the National Anthem.

At Burghley, too, Queen Elizabeth had been before Queen Victoria. She also had visited a Cecil. The Maiden Queen had travelled under difficulties. The country roads of her day had been so nearly impassable that her only means of transit had been to use a pillion behind her Lord Steward. Her seat in the chapel was pointed out to the Queen and Prince Albert when they went there for morning prayers. Whether or not both queens whiled away a rainy day by going over the whole manor-house, down to the kitchen, we cannot say; but it is not likely that her Majesty's predecessor underwent the ordeal to her gravity of passing through a gentleman's bedroom and finding his best wig and whiskers displayed upon a block on a chest of drawers. And we are not aware that Queen Elizabeth witnessed such an interesting family rite as that which her Majesty graced by her presence. The youngest daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter was christened in the chapel, at six o'clock in the evening, before the Queen, and was named for her "Lady Victoria Cecil," while Prince Albert stood as godfather to the child. After the baptism the Queen kissed her little namesake, and Prince Albert presented her with a gold cup bearing the inscription, "To Lady Victoria Cecil, from her godfather Albert." At dinner the newly-named child was duly toasted by the Queen's command.

The next day the royal party visited "Stamford town," from which the Mayor afterwards sent Prince Albert the gift of a pair of Wellington boots, as a sample of the trade of the place. The drive extended to the ruins of another manor-house which, Lady Bloomfield heard, was built by the Cecils for a temporary resort when their house of Burghley was swept. The Queen and the Prince planted an oak and a lime, not far from Queen Elizabeth's lime. The festivities ended with a great dinner and ball, at which the Queen did not dance. Most of the company passed before her chair of State on the dais, as they do at a drawing-room.

On the 29th of December an aged English kinswoman of the Queen's died at the Ranger's House, Blackheath, where she held the somewhat anomalous office of Ranger of Greenwich Park. This was Princess Sophia Matilda, daughter of the Duke of Gloucester, George III.'s brother, and sister of the late Duke of Gloucester, the husband of his cousin, Princess Mary.

Her mother's history was a romance. She was the beautiful niece of Horace Walpole, the illegitimate daughter of his brother, the Earl of Oxford. She married first the Earl of Waldegrave, and became the mother of the three lovely sisters whom Sir Joshua Reynolds's brush immortalised. The widowed countess caught the fancy of the royal Duke, just as it was said, in contemporary letters, that another fair young widow turned the head of another brother of the King's. George III. refused at first to acknowledge the Duke of Gloucester's marriage, but finally withdrew his opposition. If, as was reported, the Duke of York married Lady Mary Coke, the marriage was never ratified. The risk of such marriages caused the passing of the Royal Marriage Act, which rendered the marriage of any member of the royal family without the consent of the reigning sovereign illegal. The children of the Duke of Gloucester and his Duchess were two-Prince William and Princess Sophia Matilda. They held the somewhat doubtful position, perhaps more marked in those days, of a family royal on one side of the house only. The brother, if not a very brilliant, an inoffensive and not an illiberal prince, though wicked wags called him "Silly Billy," improved the situation by his marriage with the amiable and popular Princess Mary, to whom a private gentleman, enamoured by hearsay with her virtues, left a considerable fortune. We get a passing glimpse of the sister, Princess Sophia Matilda, in Fanny Burney's diary. She was then a pretty, sprightly girl, having apparently inherited some of her beautiful mother's and half-sisters' attractions. She was admitted to terms of considerable familiarity and intimacy with her royal cousins; and yet she was not of the circle of Queen Charlotte, neither could she descend gracefully to a lower rank. No husband, royal or noble, was found for her. One cannot think of her without attaching a sense of loneliness to her princely estate. She survived her brother, the Duke of Gloucester, ten years, and died at the age of seventy-two at the Ranger's House, Blackheath, from which she had dispensed many kindly charities. At her funeral the royal standard was hoisted half- mast high on Greenwich Hospital, the Observatory, the churches of St. Mary and St. Alphege, and on Blackheath. She was laid, with nearly all her royal race for the last two generations, in the burial-place of kings, St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Prince Albert occupied his stall as a Knight of the Garter, with a mourning scarf across his field- marshal's uniform.

In the middle of January, 1845, the Queen and Prince Albert went on a visit to the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe, which was still unstripped of its splendid possessions and interesting antiquarian relics. The huge gathering of neighbours and tenants included waggons full of labourers, admitted into the park to see the Queen's arrival and the illumination of the great house at night.

The amusements of the next two days, the ordinary length of a royal visit, began with battues for the Prince, when the accumulation of game was so enormous that, in place of the fact being remarkable that "he hit almost everything he fired at," it would have been singular if a good shot could have avoided doing so. Fifty beaters, so near each other that their sticks almost touched, entered a thick cover and drove the game past the place where the sportsmen were stationed, into the open space of the park. Out the hares rushed from every quarter, "so many of them, that it was often impossible to stop more than one out of half-a-dozen. The ground immediately in front of the shooters became strewn with dead and dying.... It was curious to behold the evident reluctance with which the hares left their retreat, and then their perplexity at finding themselves so beset without. Many actually made for the canal, and swam like dogs across a piece of water nearly a hundred yards wide, shaking themselves upon landing, and making off without any apparent distress. The pheasants were still more averse 'to come and be killed.' For some time not one appeared above the trees. The cocks were heard crowing like domestic fowls, as the numerous tribe retreated before the sticks of the advancing army of beaters. Upon arriving, however, at the edge of the wood, quite a cloud ascended, and the slaughter was proportionately great."

"Slaughter," not sport, is the appropriate word. One cannot help thinking that so it must have struck the Prince; nor are we surprised that, on the next opportunity he had of exercising a sportsman's legitimate vocation, with the good qualities of patience, endurance, and skill, which it is calculated to call forth, emphatic mention is made of his keen enjoyment.

Besides shooting there was walking for both ladies and gentlemen, to the number of twenty guests, "in the mild, clear weather," in the beautiful park. There was the usual county gathering, in order to confer on the upper ten thousand, within a radius of many miles, the much-prized honour of "meeting" the Queen at a dinner or a ball. Lastly, her Majesty and the Prince planted the oak and the cedar which were to rank like heirlooms, and be handed down as trophies of a royal visit and princely favour, to future generations.

The Queen and Prince Albert returned to Windsor on the evening of Saturday, the 18th of January, and on the afternoon of Monday, the 20th, they started again to pay a long-projected visit to her old friend the Duke of Wellington at Strathfieldsaye. It was known that the Duke had set his heart on entertaining his sovereign in his own house, and she not only granted him the boon, but in consideration of his age, his laurels, and the long and intimate connection between them, she let the visit have more of a private and friendly character than the visits of sovereigns to subjects were wont to have. However, the country did not lose its gala. Arches of winter evergreens instead of summer flowers, festive banners, loyal inscriptions, yeoman corps, holiday faces, met her on all sides. At Swallowfield-a name which Mary Russell Mitford has made pleasant to English ears-"no less a person than the Speaker of the House of Commons," the representative of an old Huguenot refugee, the Right Honourable John Shaw Lefevre, commanded the troop of yeomanry.

The Iron Duke met his honoured guests in the hall and conducted them to the library. Every day the same formula was gone through. "The Duke takes the Queen in to dinner, sits by her Majesty, and after dinner gets up and says, 'With your Majesty's permission I give the health of her Majesty,' and then the same to the Prince. They then adjourn to the library, and the Duke sits on the sofa by the Queen (almost as a father would sit by a daughter) for the rest of the evening until eleven o'clock, the Prince and the gentlemen being scattered about in the library or the billiard-room, which opens into it. In a large conservatory beyond, the band of the Duke's grenadier regiment plays through the evening."

There was much that was unique and kindly in the relations between the Queen and the greatest soldier of his day. He had stood by her baptismal font; she had been his guest, when she was the girl- Princess, at Walmer. He had sat in her first Council; he had witnessed her marriage; she was to give his name to one of her sons; in fact, he had taken part in every event of her life. The present arrangements were a graceful, well-nigh filial, tribute of affectionate regard for the old man who had served his country both on the battle-field and in the senate, who had watched his Queen's career with the keenest interest, and rejoiced in her success as something with which he had to do.

The old soldier also gave the Prince shooting, but it was the "fine wild sport" which might have been expected from the host, and which seemed more to the taste of the guest. And in the party of gentlemen who walked for miles over the ploughed land and through the brushwood, none kept up the pace better than the veteran.

The weather was broken and partly wet during the Queen's stay at Strathfieldsaye, and in lieu of out-of-door exercise, the tennis-court came into request. Lord Charles Wellesley, the Duke's younger son, played against professional players, and Prince Albert engaged Lord Charles and one of the professional players, the Queen looking on.

When the visit was over, the Duke punctiliously performed his part of riding on horseback by her Majesty's carriage for the first stage of her journey.

Comical illustrations are given of the old nobleman and soldier's dry rebuffs, administered to the members of the press and the public generally, who haunted Strathfieldsaye on this occasion.

The first was in reply to a request for admission to the house on the plea that the writer was one of the staff of a popular journal commissioned to give the details of the visit. "Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Mr. --, and begs to say he does not see what his house at Strathfieldsaye has to do with the public press." The other was in the form of a still more ironical notice put up in the grounds, "desiring that people who wish to see the house may drive up to the hall-door and ring the bell, but that they are to abstain from walking on the flagstones and looking in at the windows."

In February the Queen opened Parliament in person for what was destined to be a stormy session, particularly in relation to Sir Robert Peel's measure proposing an increased annual grant of money to the Irish Roman Catholic priests' college of Maynooth. In the Premier's speech, in introducing the Budget, he was able to pay a well-merited compliment on the wise and judicious economy shown in the management of her Majesty's income, so that it was equal to meet the heavy calls made upon it by the visits of foreign sovereigns, who were entertained in a manner becoming the dignity of the sovereign, "without adding one tittle to the burdens of the country. And I am not required, on the part of her Majesty," went on Sir Robert Peel, "to press for the extra expenditure of one single shilling on account of these unforeseen causes of increased expenditure. I think, to state this is only due to the personal credit of her Majesty, who insists upon it that there shall be every magnificence required by her station, but without incurring a single debt." In order to show how the additional cost of such royal hospitality taxed the resources even of the Queen of England, it may be well to give an idea of the ordinary scale of housekeeping at Windsor Castle. Lady Bloomfield likens the kitchen-fire to Nebuchadnezzar's burning fiery furnace. Even when there was no company, from fifteen to twenty joints hung roasting there. In one year the number of people fed at dinner in the Castle amounted to a hundred and thirteen thousand!

Shall we be accused of small moralities and petty lessons in thrift if we say that this passage in Sir Robert Peel's speech recalls the stories of the child-Princess's training, in a wholesome horror of debt, and the exercise of such little acts of self-denial as can alone come in a child's way; that it brings to mind the Tunbridge anecdote of the tiny purchaser on her donkey, bidden to look at her empty purse when a little box in the bazaar caught her eye, and prohibited from going further in obtaining the treasure, till the next quarter's allowance was due? Well might the nation that had read the report of Sir Robert Peel's speech listen complacently when it heard in the following month, of the Queen's acquisition of a private property which should be all her own and her husband's, to do with, as they chose. Another country bestowed, upon quite different grounds, on one of its sovereigns the honourable title of King Honest Man. Here was Queen Honest Woman, who would not buy what she could not afford, or ask her people to pay for fancies in which she indulged, regardless of her means. A different example had been presented by poor Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, who, after a course of what their most faithful servants admitted to be grievous misrule and misappropriation of public dignities and funds-to satisfy the ambition and greed of favourites or their friends-in the face of national bankruptcy, private ruin, and widespread disaffection, in the very death-throes of the Revolution, chose that time of all others to buy-under whatever specious pretext of exchange and indemnification-for him who had already so many hunting-seats, the fresh one of Rambouillet; for her, who had Little Trianon in its perfection, the new suburban country house of St. Cloud.

Osborne abounded in the advantages which the royal couple sought. It was in the Isle of Wight, which her Majesty had loved in her girlhood, with the girdle of sea that gave such assurance of the much-courted, much-needed seclusion, as could hardly be procured elsewhere- certainly not within a reasonable distance of London. It was a lovely place by nature, with no end of capabilities for the practice of the Prince's pleasant faculty of landscape-gardening, with which he had already done wonders in the circumscribed grounds of Buckingham Palace and the larger field of Windsor. There were not only woods and valleys and charming points of view-among them a fine look at Spithead; the woods went down to the sea, and the beach belonged to the estate. Such a quiet country home for a country and home-loving Queen and Prince, and for the little children, to whom tranquillity, freedom, the woods, the fields, and the sea-sands were of such vital and lasting consequence, was inestimable.

In addition to other outlets for an active, beneficent nature, Osborne, with its works of building, planting, and improving going on for years to come, had also its farms, like the Home Farm at Windsor. And the Prince was fond of farming no less than of landscape-gardening -proud of his practical success in making it pay, deeply interested in all questions of agriculture and their treatment, so as to secure permanent employment and ample provision for the labourers. Prince Albert's love of animals, too, found scope in these farming operations. When the Queen and the Prince visited the Home Farm the tame pigeons would settle on his hat and her shoulders. The accompanying engraving represents the pasture and part of the Home Farm at Osborne. "The cow in the group was presented to her Majesty by the Corporation of Guernsey, when the Queen visited the Channel Islands; the animal is a beautiful specimen of the Alderney breed, and is a great favourite ... on the forehead of the cow is a V distinctly marked; a peculiarity, it may be presumed, which led to the presentation; the other animals are her calves."

In the course of this session of Parliament, the Queen sought more than once to mark her acknowledgment of the services of Sir Robert Peel, round whose political career troubles were gathering. She acted as sponsor to his grandchild-the heir of the Jersey family-and she offered Sir Robert, through Lord Aberdeen, the Order of the Garter, an offer which the Prime Minister respectfully declined in words that deserve to be remembered. He sprang from the people, he said, and was essentially of the people, and such an honour, in his case, would be misapplied. His heart was not set upon titles of honour or social distinction. His reward lay in her Majesty's confidence, of which, by many indications, she had given him the fullest assurance; and when he left her service the only distinction he courted was that she should say to him, "You have been a faithful servant, and have done your duty to your country and to myself."