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CHAP.

XL. BIRTH OF THE FIRST GREAT-GRANDCHILD--MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF ALBANY--CONCLUSION

LIST OF STEEL PLATES.

H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES OSBORNE HOUSE THE PASTURE, OSBORNE THE AMAZON THE ROYAL YACHT OFF MOUNT ST. MICHAEL THE PRINCESS LOUISE THE PRINCESS HELENA PRINCESSES HELENA AND LOUISE THE HUNTER HYDE PARK IN 1851 THE FISHER H.R.H. THE DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE, K.G., ETC. THE CRADLE H.R.H. THE PRINCESS OF WALES H.R.H. THE PRINCESS OF WALES THE ALBERT MEMORIAL MONUMENT TO THE PRINCESS ALICE OF HESSE

QUEEN VICTORIA.

ROYAL PROGRESSES TO BURGHLEY, STOWE, AND STRATHFIELDSAYE.

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.

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.

"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 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.

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!

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."

THE QUEEN'S POWDER BALL.

The period chosen for the representation was much nearer the present. It was only a hundred years back, from 1740 to 1750. It may be that this comparative nearness fettered rather than emancipated the players in the game, and that, though civil wars and clan feuds had long died out, and the memory of the Scotch rebellion was no more than a picturesque tragic romance, a trifle of awkwardness survived in the encounter, face to face once more, in the very guise of the past, of the descendants of the men and women who had won at Prestonpans and lost at Culloden. It was said that a grave and stately formality distinguished this ball--a tone attributed to dignified, troublesome fashions--stranger then, but which since these days have become more familiar to us.

Among the multitude of guests assembled at Buckingham Palace, the privileged few who danced in the Queen's minuets, as well as the members of the royal family, arrived by the Garden Gate and were received in the Yellow Drawing-room. Included in this select company was a German princess who had lately married an English subject-- Princess Marie of Baden, wife of the Marquis of Douglas, not the first princess who had wedded into the noble Scotch house of Hamilton, though it was many a long century since Earl Walter received--

all Arran's isle To dower his royal bride

Then her Majesty left the ball-room and repaired to the throne-room, where the first minuet was formed. It is only necessary to recall that most courtly of slow and graceful dances to judge how well suited it was for this ball. The Queen danced with her cousin, Prince George of Cambridge. Her Majesty wore a wonderful dress of cloth of gold and cloth of silver, with daisies and poppies worked in silks, and shaded the natural colours; trimmings and ruffles of exquisite old lace, stomacher covered with old lace and jewels, the sacque set off with scarlet ribands, the fair hair powdered under a tiara and crown of diamonds, dainty white satin shoes with scarlet rosettes--a diamond in each rosette, the Order of the Garter on the arm, the Star and Riband of the Order.

Prince George was less fortunate in the regimentals of a cavalry officer a century back; for, as it happened, while the costume of 1740-50 was favourable to women and to civilians, it was trying to military men.

Prince Albert danced with the Duchesse de Nemours. These two had been early playmates who never, even in later and sadder days, got together without growing merry over the stories and jokes of their childhood in Coburg. The Prince must have been one of the most graceful figures there, in a crimson velvet coat edged with gold and lined with white satin, on the left breast the splendid Star of the Order of the Garter, shoulder-strap and sword inlaid with diamonds, white satin waistcoat brocaded with gold, breeches of crimson velvet with gold buttons, shoes of black kid with red heels and diamond buckles, three- cornered hat trimmed with gold lace, edged with white ostrich feathers, a magnificent loop of diamonds, and the black cockade of the Georges, not the white cockade of the Jameses.

His golden-haired partner was in a tastefully gay and fantastic as well as splendid costume of rose-coloured Chinese damask, with gold blonde and pearls, over a petticoat of point d'Alen?on, with a deep border of silver and silver rosettes. The stomacher of brilliants and pearls, on the left shoulder a nosegay with diamond wheat-ears interspersed, shoes of purple satin with fleurs-de-lys embroidered in gold and diamonds, as became a daughter of France, and gloves embroidered with similar fleurs-de-lys.

There were many gay and gallant figures and fair faces in that minuet of minuets. Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar was meant to dance with the young Marchioness of Douro, but she by some strange chance came too late for the honour, and her place was supplied by another young matron and beauty, Lady Jocelyn, formerly Lady Fanny Cowper. Prince Leiningen, who wore a white suit faced with blue and a buff waistcoat edged with silver lace, danced with Lady Mount-Edgcumbe. The Duke of Beaufort once more disputed with the Earl of Wilton the distinction of being the finest gentleman present.

The Queen danced in four minuets, standing up in the second with Prince Albert. This minuet also included several of the most beautiful women of the time and of the Court; notably Lady Seymour, one of the Sheridan sisters, the Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton tournament; and Lady Canning.

After the second minuet the Queen and all the company returned to the ball-room, where two other minuets, those of Lady Jersey and Lady Chesterfield, were danced, and between them was given Lady Breadalbane's strathspey. There was such crowding to see these dances that the Lord Chamberlain had difficulty in making room for them. While Musard furnished special music for the minuets and quadrilles, adapting it in one case from airs of the '45, the Queen's piper, Mackay, gave forth, for the benefit of the strathspey and reel- dancers, the stirring strains of "Miss Drummond of Perth," "Tullochgorum," and "The Marquis of Huntly's Highland Fling," which must have rung with wild glee through the halls of kings.

Lady Chesterfield's minuet was the last dance before supper, served with royal splendour in the dining-room, to which the Queen passed at twelve o'clock. After supper the Queen danced in a quadrille and in the two next minuets. Her first partner was the Duc de Nemours, who wore an old French infantry general's uniform--a coat of white cloth, the front covered with gold embroidery, sleeves turned up with crimson velvet, waistcoat and breeches of crimson velvet, stockings of crimson silk, and red-heeled shoes with diamond buckles. In the second minuet her Majesty had her brother, the Prince of Leiningen, for her partner. The ball was ended, according to a good old English fashion, by the quaint changing measure of "Sir Roger de Coverley," known in Scotland as "The Haymakers," in which the Queen had her husband for her partner. This country-dance was danced in the picture gallery.

Let who would be the beauty at the Queen's ball, there was at least one poetess there in piquant black and cerise, with cerise roses and priceless point ? l'aiguille, Lady John Scott, who had been the witty heiress, Miss Spottiswoode of Spottiswoode. She wrote to an old refrain one of the most pathetic of modern Scotch ballads--

Douglas, Douglas, tender and true

The beauty of the ball was the Marchioness of Douro, who not so long ago had been the beauty of the season as Lady Elizabeth Hay, daughter of the Marquis of Tweeddale, when she caught the fancy of the elder, son and heir of the Duke of Wellington. In this case beauty was not unadorned, for the lovely Marchioness, the Greek mould of whose head attracted the admiration of all judges, was said to wear jewels to the value of sixty thousand pounds, while the superb point-lace flounce to her white brocade must have been a source of pious horror to good Roman Catholics, since it was believed to have belonged to the sacred vestments of a pope.

Miss Burdett-Coutts wore a lustrous diadem and necklace that had once graced the brow and throat of poor Marie Antoinette, and had found their way at last into jewel-cases no longer royal, owing their glittering contents to the wealth of a great city banker.

A word about the antiquated finery of the Iron Duke, with which the old soldier sought to please his young mistress. It provoked a smile or two from the more frivolous as the grey, gaunt, spindle-shanked old man stalked by, yet it was not without its pathetic side. The Duke wore a scarlet coat, a tight fit, laced with gold, with splendid gold buttons and frogs, the brilliant star of the Order of the Garter, and the Order of the Golden Fleece, a waistcoat of scarlet cashmere covered with gold lace, breeches of scarlet kerseymere trimmed with gold lace; gold buckles, white silk stockings, cocked hat laced with gold, sword studded with rose diamonds and emeralds.

It is nearly forty years since these resplendent masquers trod the floors of Buckingham Palace, and if the changes which time has brought about had been foreseen, if the veil which shrouds the future had been lifted, what emotions would have been called forth!

Who could have borne to hear that the bright Queen and giver of the fete would pass the years of her prime in the mournful shade of disconsolate widowhood? That the pale crown of a premature death was hovering over the head of him who was the life of her life, the active promoter and sustainer of all that was good and joyous in that great household, all that was great and happy in the kingdom over which she ruled?

Who would have ventured to prophesy that of the royal kindred and cherished guests, the Prince of Leiningen was to die a landless man, the Duc de Nemours to spend long years in exile, the Duchesse to be cut down in the flower of her womanhood? Who would have guessed that this great nobleman, the head of an ancient house, was to perish by a miserable accident in a foreign hotel; that his sister, the wife of an unfortunate statesman, was to be dragged through the mire of a divorce court; that the treasures of a princely home were to pass away from the race that had accumulated them, under the strokes of an auctioneer's hammer? Who could have dreamt that this fine intellect and loving heart would follow the lord of their destiny to Hades, and wander there for evermore distracted, in the land of shadows, where there is no light of the sun to show the way, no firm ground to stay the tottering feet and groping hands? As for these two fair sisters in Watteau style of blue and pink, and green and pink taffetas, lace, and pearls, and roses--surely the daintiest, most aristocratic shepherdesses ever beheld--one of them would have lost her graceful equanimity, reddened with affront, and tingled to the finger-tips with angry unbelief if she had been warned beforehand that she would be amongst the last of the high-born, high-bred brides who would forfeit her birthright and her presence at a Queen's Court by agreeing to be married at the hands of a blacksmith instead of a bishop, before the rude hymeneal altar at Gretna.

In the month of July the King of the Netherlands, who, as Prince of Orange, had served on the Duke of Wellington's staff at the close of the Peninsular War, came to England and took up his quarters at Mivart's Hotel, the Queen being in the Isle of Wight, where he joined her. Prince Albert met the King at Gosport and escorted him to Osborne. On his return to London the King, who was already a general in the English army, received his appointment as field-marshal, and reviewed the Household troops in Hyde Park. He paid a second visit to the Queen at Osborne before he left Woolwich for Holland.

A curious accident happened when the Queen prorogued Parliament on the 9th of August. The Duke of Argyle, an elderly man, was carrying the crown on a velvet cushion, when, in walking backwards before the Queen, he appeared to forget the two steps, leading from the platform on which the throne stands to the floor, and stumbled, the crown slipping from the cushion and falling to the ground, with the loss of some diamonds. The Queen expressed her concern for the Duke instead of for the crown; but on her departure the keeper of the House of Lords appeared in front of the throne, and prevented too near an approach to it, with the chance of further damage to the dropped jewels. The misadventure was naturally the subject of a good deal of private conversation in the House.

THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO GERMANY.

On the evening of the day that she prorogued Parliament, the Queen and the Prince with the Earl of Aberdeen as the minister in attendance, started from Buckingham Palace that she might pay her first visit to Germany. Surely none of all the new places she had visited within the last few years could have been of such surpassing interest to the traveller. It was her mother's country as well as her husband's, the home of her brother and sister, the place of which she must have heard, with which she must have had the kindliest associations from her earliest years.

The first stage of the journey--in stormy weather, unfortunately--was to Antwerp, where the party did not land till the following day, when they proceeded to Malines, where they were met by King Leopold and Queen Louise, who parted from their royal niece at Verviers. On the Prussian frontier Lord Westmoreland, the English ambassador, and Baron Bunsen met her Majesty. "To hear the people speak German," she wrote in her Journal, "to see the German soldiers, seemed to me so singular. I overheard people saying that I looked very English."

At Aix-la-Chapelle the King and Prince of Prussia received the visitors and accompanied them to Cologne. The ancient dirty town of the Three Kings gave the strangers an enthusiastic reception. The burghers even did their best to get rid of the unsavoury odours which distinguish the town of sweet essences, by pouring eau-de-Cologne on the roadways.

This visiting together the ground once so familiar to the Prince formed an era in two lives. It was the fulfilment of a beautiful, brilliant expectation which had been half dim and vague when the ardent lad was a quiet, diligent student, living simply, almost frugally, like the other students at the university on the Rhine, and his little cousin across the German Ocean, from whom he had parted in the homely red-brick palace of Kensington, had been proclaimed Queen of a great country. The prospect of their union was still very uncertain in those days, and yet it must sometimes have crossed his mind as he built air-castles in the middle of his reading; or strolled with a comrade along those old-fashioned streets, among their population of "wild-looking students," with long fair hair, pipes between their lips, and the scars of many a sword-duel on forehead and cheek; or penetrated into the country, where the brown peasant women, "with curious caps and handkerchiefs," came bearing their burden of sticks from the forest, like figures in old fairy tales. He must have told himself that the time might come when something like the transformation of a fairy-tale would be effected on his account; the plain living and high-thinking and college discipline of Bonn be exchanged for the dignity and influence of an English sovereign's consort. Then, perhaps, he would bring his bride to the dear old "fatherland," and show her where he had dreamt about her among his books.

At the banquet in the afternoon the accomplished King gave the Queen's health in a speech fit for a poet. He referred to a word sweet alike to British and German hearts. Thirty years before it had echoed on the heights of Waterloo from British and German tongues, after days of hot and desperate fighting, to mark the glorious triumph of their brotherhood in arms. "Now it resounds on the banks of our fair Rhine, amidst the blessings of that peace which was the hallowed fruit of the great conflict. That word is 'Victoria.' Gentlemen, drink to the health of her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and to that of her august consort."

"The Queen," remarked Bunsen, "bowed at the first word, but much lower at the second. Her eyes brightened through tears, and as the King was taking his seat again, she rose and bent towards him and kissed his cheek, then took her seat again with a beaming countenance."

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