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[Contents.]
[List of Illustrations] (In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.) (etext transcriber's note) |
H. R. H. THE PRINCESS OF WALES.
From a Photograph by Messrs. W. & D. Downey, London.
THE
LIFE AND TIMES
OF
QUEEN VICTORIA.
BY
ROBERT WILSON.
——
Illustrated.
——
VOL. III.
CONTENTS.
| [CHAPTER I] LORD DERBY’S SECOND ADMINISTRATION. | |
|---|---|
| Days of the Rebellion—The Operations in China—The Queen’s Personal Direction of Affairs—Palmerston’swaning Popularity—Attacks on Lord Canning—The Orsini Plot—French Menaces toEngland—The Conspiracy Bill—Defeat of the Ministry—The Second Derby-Disraeli Government—Abandonmentof the Conspiracy Bill—The Queen’s Opposition to the India Bill—The Oudh Proclamationand Ellenborough’s “Secret Despatch”—A Tropical Summer and an Exhausted Legislature—Confirmationof the Prince of Wales—The Queen at Birmingham and Leeds—The Dispute between France andEngland about the Principalities—The Queen’s Visit to Cherbourg—The Royal Visit to Prussia—TheMeeting with the Princess Frederick William—A Royal “Middie”—The Indian Proclamation—TheQueen at Balmoral—Donati’s Comet—The Controversy over the Indian Army—Abdication of the Kingof Prussia—The Queen’s Letter to the Prince of Wales—France and Portugal—Failing Health of thePrince Consort | [1] |
| [CHAPTER II] THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION. | |
| Napoleon’s New Year’s Reception—The Secret Pacte de Famille—Victor Emmanuel and the Grido diDolore—The Queen’s Views on the Italian Movement—The Queen’s Letter to Napoleon—Meeting ofParliament—Cavour Threatens Napoleon—Appeal of Prussia to the Queen for Advice—Mr. Disraeli’sReform Bill—Lord John Russell’s Amendment—Defeat of the Government—An Appeal to the Country—TheQueen Criticises Austria’s Blunders—War at Last—The General Election—Reconciliation ofLord Palmerston and Lord John Russell—Fall of the Derby-Disraeli Administration—The Palmerston-RussellMinistry—Austrian Defeats and French Victories—The Peace of Villafranca—PalmerstonDuped—Illness of the Duchess of Kent—The Budget—The Queen and Palmerston—Triumph of theQueen’s Policy—The Holiday at Balmoral—Dancing in the New Year | [28] |
| [CHAPTER III] THE COURT AND THE CABINET. | |
| The Queen’s Distrust of French Policy—Her Conferences with Lord Clarendon—The French Pamphlet on“The Pope and the Congress”—Palmerston’s Proposal of an Alliance Offensive and Defensive withFrance—Intriguing between Palmerston and Persigny—Recall of Cavour—Affairs in China—Mr.Cobden’s Commercial Treaty with France—Cession of Nice and Savoy to France—The Anglo-FrenchAlliance at an End—Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill—Threatened Rupture with France—RussiaAttempts to Re-open the Eastern Question—Garibaldi’s Invasion of the Two Sicilies—Collapse of theNeapolitan Monarchy—The Piedmontese Invade the Papal States—Annexation of the Sicilies toSardinia—Meeting between Napoleon III. and the German Sovereigns at Baden—A New HolyAlliance—The Mahometan Atrocities in Syria—The Macdonald Scandal—Palmerston’s FortificationScheme—The Lords Reject the Bill Abolishing the Paper Duty—The Volunteer Movement—Reviewsin Hyde Park and Edinburgh—The Queen at Wimbledon—The Prince of Wales’s Tour in Canadaand the United States—Betrothal of the Princess Alice—The Queen and her Grandchild—SeriousAccident to the Prince Consort—Illness of the Queen | [43] |
| [CHAPTER IV] THE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. | |
| England in 1861—The Jumble of Parties—Secret Alliance Between Palmerston and the Tories—Openingof Parliament—The Prince Consort and the “Two Old Italian Masters”—Lady William Russell’sSalon—The Proposed Sale of Venice—The Fall of Gaeta—Prussia and Italy—Death of Cavour—ACasus Belli against France—Napoleon in the East—Denmark and the Duchies—The Queen’s PrivateSorrows—Last Illness and Death of the Duchess of Kent—Renewed Attacks in the Press on PrinceAlbert—Palmerston Accused of Tampering with Despatches—Anecdote of Lord Derby and LordGranville—The Budget—Repeal of the Paper Duty—Palmerston’s “Grudge” Against Prince Albert—TheMarriage of the Princess Alice announced—The Queen and Her Social Duties—Two Drawing-Roomsand Two Investitures—A Season of Mourning—Death of Lord Herbert of Lea—Lord JohnRussell’s Peerage—Reform and the Working Classes—Ministerial Changes—The Queen’s Tour inIreland—The Queen and German Unity—Coronation of the King of Prussia—Death of the King ofPortugal—Fatigue of the Prince Consort—Signs of His Last Illness—The Queen at Her Husband’sSick-Bed—A Mournful Vigil—The Prince Consort’s Last Words—Scene at the Death-Bed—TheSorrow of the Country—The Queen’s Despair—Her Removal from Windsor—Prince Albert’s Characterand Career—His Funeral—The Scene at the Grave—The Queen and the Princess Alice | [73] |
| [CHAPTER V] WAR AND FAMINE. | |
| Outbreak of Civil War in the United States—Origin of the Dispute—The Missouri Compromise—Effect ofthe “Gold Rush” on the Extension of Slavery—Colonising Nebraska—The Struggle in “BleedingKansas”—Assault on Senator Sumner—The Wyandotte Constitution—The Dred Scott Case—Electionof Mr. Lincoln as President—Secession of South Carolina—Organisation of the Southern Confederacy—TheFiring of the First Shot—Capture of Fort Sumter—Lincoln’s Call to Arms—Opinion in England—TheTrent Affair—The Queen and the Prince Consort avert War—Opening of Parliament—Bitter Controversyover the Education Code—Parliament and the Civil War—The Cotton Famine—A Relief Bill—WarExpenditure—Mr. Disraeli denounces Lord Palmerston’s “Bloated Armaments”—A Budget withouta Surplus—The Fortifications at Spithead—Floating versus Fixed Forts—A Mexican Adventure—Revolutionin Greece—Bismarck’s Visit to London—Anecdote of Bismarck and Mr. Disraeli—Progressof the American War—Mr. Peabody’s Benefactions—The Exhibition of 1862—The Prince of Wales’sTour in the East—The Hartley Colliery Accident—Marriage of the Princess Alice—The Queen’s Visitto Belgium—Her Meeting with the Princess Alexandra of Denmark—The Queen’s Visit to Gotha—Removalof the Prince Consort’s Remains to the Mausoleum at Frogmore | [111] |
| [CHAPTER VI] THE MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF WALES. | |
| England in 1863—The Prince of Wales Summoned as a Peer of Parliament—His Introduction to theHouse of Lords—Cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece—Mr. Disraeli’s Policy—The Prince ofWales’s Income—The Dowry of the Princess—Approaching Marriage of the Prince of Wales—TheVoyage of the “Sea-King’s Daughter”—Reception of the Princess Alexandra at Gravesend—HerEntry into London—The Scene in the City—The West End en Fête—Loyalty of Clubland—Accident tothe Royal Party at Slough—The High Churchmen and the Queen—Objections to a Royal Marriagein Lent—The Dispensing Power of the Primate—A Visit to Frogmore—The Queen at the Prince ofWales’s Marriage—The Scene in St. George’s Chapel—The Wedding Presents—The Ceremony—TheWedding Guests hustled by Roughs—Riots in Ireland—Illuminated London—Foreign Policy—ThePolish Question—The Russian Rebuff to Lord Palmerston—Napoleon III. Proposes a Congress of Sovereigns—LordRussell Condemns the Proposal—The Death-Knell of the Anglo-French Alliance—Franceand Mexico and the Archduke Maximilian | [146] |
| [CHAPTER VII] LORD PALMERSTON’S LAST CONTEST WITH THE QUEEN. | |
| The Sleswig-Holstein Question—The Danish Succession—Palmerston’s Partisanship—The “Danification” ofthe Duchies—The Letters-Patent of Christian VIII.—The Revolution of ’48—The Sleswig-HolsteinTreaty of Berlin—Salic Law in the Duchies—Palmerston’s Intrigue with the Russian Ambassador—TheProtocol of 1850—The Queen’s Objections to it—Prince Albert’s Advice to the Prince of Noër—TheTreaty of London—Lord Malmesbury’s Fatal Blunder—His Mistake as to the Mandate of the Diet—Letters-Patentof Frederick VII.—His Death—Accession of Christian IX.—Revolt of the Duchies—Proclamationof the Duke of Augustenburg as Sovereign—Mr. Gladstone’s Popular Budget—Deathof Sir George Cornewall Lewis—The Queen’s Letter to Lady Theresa Lewis—The Dispute withBrazil—The Prison Ministers Bill—A South Kensington Job—Hoodwinking the Commons—A “Scene”in the House of Commons—A Ministerial Defeat—Sir George Grey and the City Police—The CivilWar in America—Escape of the Alabama—Illegal Seizure of the Alexandra—Blockade Running—ProclamationAbolishing Slavery—Progress of the War—Net Results of the Campaigns | [164] |
| [CHAPTER VIII] THE DANISH WAR. | |
| Stagnant Politics—Excitement over the Danish War—Attitude of the Queen—Withdrawal of the Danesfrom Holstein—Lord Wodehouse’s Mission—The Quarterly Review advocates War—Mr. Disraeli Repudiatesa War Policy—Lord Palmerston’s Secret Plans—The Case against Germany—The Queen’sWarnings—Mr. Cobden’s Arguments—Lord Russell’s “Demands”—Palmerston drafts a Warlike Queen’sSpeech—The Queen Refuses to Sanction it—Lord Derby Summoned to Osborne—He is Pledged to aPeace Policy—Austria and Prussia in Conflict with the Diet—The Occupation of Sleswig—War atLast—Retreat of the Danes to Düppel—Palmerston’s Protests Answered by German Victories—TheInvasion of Jutland—Storming of the Düppel Redoubts—Excitement in London—Garibaldi’s Visit toLondon—Garibaldi and the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland—Anecdotes of Garibaldi’s Visit—Clarendon’sVisit to Napoleon III.—Expulsion of Garibaldi by Palmerston—Napoleon III. Agrees to Acceptthe Proposal for a Conference—Triumph of the Queen’s Peace Policy—Palmerston’s Last Struggle—HisMinistry Saved by Surrender to Mr. Cobden—The Treaty of Vienna—End of the War | [186] |
| [CHAPTER IX] THE HEIR-PRESUMPTIVE. | |
| Disputes with American Belligerents—The Southern Privateers—Uneasiness of the Queen—Federal Recruitingin Ireland—Mr. Gladstone’s Budget—Revival of the Reform Agitation—Mr. Gladstone Joins theReformers—“Essays and Reviews”—A Heresy-Hunt in Convocation—A Ribald Chancellor—TheParliamentary Duel between Wilberforce and Westbury—The Vote of Censure on Mr. Lowe—The FiveUnder-Secretaries and the House of Commons—Prorogation of Parliament—The Strife in the UnitedStates—Gambling in Cotton—A Commercial Panic in England—The Battle of Chancellorsville—Sherman’sMarch through Georgia—The Canadian Raiders—The Presidential Election—Birth of the Heir-Presumptive—Baptismof the Heir-Presumptive—The Queen’s Gift to her Little Grandson—TheQueen and the Floods at Sheffield—The Murder of Mr. Briggs—The Queen Refuses a Reprieve to theMurderer—The Queen’s Letter to the Princess Louis—John Brown and the Queen’s Pony—Dr. NormanMcLeod’s Message from the Queen—An Anniversary of Sorrow and Sympathy | [211] |
| [CHAPTER X] THE DEATH OF PALMERSTON. | |
| Opening of Parliament—Lord Russell and the American Government—Catholicism and Conservatism—Mr.Disraeli angles for the Irish Vote—Palmerston on Tenant Right—Another Panic in Piccadilly—Deathof Cobden—Failure of the “Manchester School”—A Prosperity Budget and a Round Surplus—Endof the American War—Moderation of the Victors—Assassination of President Lincoln—Reorganisingthe South—Conflict between President Johnson and the Republican Party—The MexicanEmpire and the United States—The Danish Question—The Convention of Gastein—Bismarck’s Interviewwith the Duke of Augustenburg—The Mystery of Biarritz—Lord Chancellor Westbury’s Fall—Deathand Character of Palmerston—The New Ministry—Mr. Gladstone Leader of the Commons—TheRinderpest—The Fenian Conspiracy—The Queen’s Letter on Railway Accidents—Laxity of Administrationin the Queen’s Household—Birth of Prince George of Wales—Majority of Prince Alfred—The Queenat Gotha—The Betrothal of the Princess Helena—The Last Illness and Death of King Leopold ofBelgium—His Character and Career—Suppressing a Rebellion with a Carpet-Bag | [231] |
| [CHAPTER XI] A STOP-GAP ADMINISTRATION. | |
| End of the Era of Compromise—Dawn of the new Epoch of Reform—Opening of Parliament by theQueen—The Queen’s Nervous Prostration at Osborne—Introduction of the Reform Bill—Hostility ofthe House of Commons—Dissentient Liberals in “the Cave of Adullam”—Defeat of the Reform Bill—Resignationof the Ministry—Lord Derby forms a Cabinet—His attempted Coalition with the WhigDukes—Domestic Policy during the Session—The House of Commons and the Rinderpest—AnotherProsperity Budget—Large Remissions of Taxation—Coercing Ireland—The White Terror in Jamaica—Marriageof the Princess Helena—The Financial Embarrassment of the Princess Louis of Hesse—TheQueen Intercedes with Prussia on behalf of Hesse-Darmstadt—The Queen’s Gift to Mr. Peabody—TheQueen’s Visit to Aldershot—The Foundation of the Albert Medal—Marriage of thePrincess Mary of Cambridge—The Queen’s first Telegram to the President of the United States—TheQueen’s Visit to Aberdeen and Wolverhampton | [252] |
| [CHAPTER XII] THE TIDE OF DEMOCRACY. | |
| Stemming the Tide of Democracy—Lord Derby and Reform—The Reform League—The Riots in HydePark—Cowing the Ministry—The Adullamites—Mr. Disraeli’s Resolutions—Crises in the Cabinet—TheTen Minutes Bill—The Government Measure—Mr. Gladstone’s Alterations—A Leap in the Dark—TheMovement in Favour of German Unity—The Austro-Prussian War—The Luxembourg Question—Executionof the Emperor Maximilian—Mr. Disraeli’s Budget—Academic Discussions of IrishGrievances—Fenian Outrages at Manchester and Clerkenwell—Rattening at Sheffield—Prince ArthurPasses his Military Examination—Illness of the Princess of Wales—Founding of the Royal AlbertHall—The Sultan in England—Abdul Aziz, K.G.—Visit of the Queen to the Duchess of Roxburghe—Dr.Macleod at Balmoral—Prince Arthur ill of Smallpox—The Queen Keeping Hallowe’en—Her MajestyVisits Lady Palmerston | [269] |
| [CHAPTER XIII] THE NEW ERA OF REFORM. | |
| A “Little War” in Abyssinia—King Theodore’s Arrest of Vice-Consul Cameron—The Unanswered Letterto the Queen—A Skilful but Expensive General—Sir Robert Napier’s Expedition—An AutumnalSession—Addition to the Income Tax—Parliament in 1868—A Spiritless Legislature—Fishing for a Policy—ApologeticMinisters—Mr. Bright on Repeal—The Irish Church Question—Fenian Alarms—Illness andResignation of Lord Derby—Mr. Disraeli Prime Minister—His Quarrel with Lord Chelmsford—LordDerby Arbitrates—The “Giant Chancellor”—Mr. Disraeli’s New Policy—Discontented Adullamites—PublicExecutions—Lord Mayo and Concurrent Endowment—“The Pill to Cure the Earthquake”—Mr.Gladstone Attacks the Government—The Irish Church Resolutions—Resignation or Dissolution—Mr.Disraeli’s “No Popery” Cry—Lord Chelmsford’s Bad Pun—Defeat of the Ministry—Mr. Disraeliand the Queen—“Scenes” in the House of Commons—Charges of Treason—Mr. Disraeli’s Relationswith the Queen—A Parliamentary Duel between Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Bright—The Dissolution ofParliament—Mr. Ward Hunt’s Budget—Conclusion of the Abyssinian War—The General Election—Triumphof Mr. Gladstone—Resignation of the Ministry—Mr. Gladstone’s New Cabinet—The Queen’sPoliteness to Mr. Bright—Illness of Prince Leopold—Attempted Assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh—TheQueen’s Book—The Queen Accused of Heresy—The West-End Tradesmen and the Queen—Mr.Reardon, M.P., suggests Abdication—A Bungled Volunteer Review at Windsor—A Hot LondonSeason—Serious Illness of the Queen—Her Tour in Switzerland—Death of the Archbishop of Canterbury—Conflictbetween the Queen and Mr. Disraeli as to Church Patronage—The Revolution in Spain—Rupturebetween Turkey and Greece—Another War-Cloud in the East | [300] |
| [CHAPTER XIV] A HOPEFUL YEAR. | |
| Hopefulness all round—Ministers at the Fishmongers’—The Queen’s Speech—The Legislative Bill of Fare—TheQueen and Mr. Gladstone’s Irish Church Policy—Release of Fenians—Mr. Gladstone’s Schemefor Disestablishing the Irish Church—The Debate in the Commons—The Second Reading Carried—TheBill in Committee—Read a Third Time—The Lords and the Bill—Amendments of the Peers—TheLords Bought Off—The Bill becomes Law—Mr. Lowe’s First Budget—The Endowed Schools Bill—TheHabitual Criminals Act—The Lords and the Commons’ Legislation—Official Hostility to ReformingMinisters—Weak Members of the Cabinet—Mr. Reverdy Johnson and the Alabama Claims—ThePolicy of “Masterly Inactivity”—Liberalism in France—Prince Leopold’s Illness—The Queen’s Interviewwith Mr. Carlyle—Visit of Ismail Pasha to the Queen—The Peabody Statue—Prince Alfred in Australia—ThePrince of Wales and Court Dress—Death of Lord Derby—Death of Lady Palmerston—Openingof Blackfriars Bridge and Holborn Viaduct—O’Donovan Rossa, M.P.—Orangemen and Fenians | [325] |
| [CHAPTER XV] FALL OF THE SECOND EMPIRE. | |
| Social condition of the Country in 1870—Mr. Bright’s “Six Omnibuses in Temple Bar”—Opening of Parliament—Mr.Gladstone’s Irish Land Bill—Amendments to the Bill—Dual-Ownership Established—TheBill and the House of Lords—The Revolt of Lord Salisbury—The Education Bill—Mutiny of the LiberalDissenters—Mr. Lowe’s Second Budget—The Civil Service opened to Competition—Mr. Cardwell’sFailure at the War Office—The Queen and the Army—Mr. Childers and Admiralty Reform—Mr. Baxterand Navy Contracts—The Wreck of the Captain—Lord Granville and the Colonies—Death of LordClarendon—The Franco-Prussian War—Collapse of the French Armies—Sedan—Fall of the BonapartistDynasty—Proclamation of the Third Republic—Investment of Paris—The Government of NationalDefence at Tours—M. Gambetta Rouses Prostrate France—Gallant Stand of the Mobiles—A PassingGlimpse of Victory—The Queen and the War—Prussia and England—Russia Repudiates the Black SeaClauses of the Treaty of Paris—Papal Infallibility and the Italian Occupation of Rome—King WilliamProclaimed German Emperor—Opening of London University—Betrothal of the Princess Louise—Deathof General Grey—Death of Dickens—The Novelist and the Queen—Garden Party at WindsorCastle—The Red River Expedition | [354] |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE PRINCE CONSORT.
(After the Photograph by Mayall.)
BALMORAL CASTLE, FROM THE NORTH, LOOKING TOWARDS LOCHNAGAR.
(After a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co., Aberdeen.)
THE
Life and Times of Queen Victoria
CHAPTER I.
LORD DERBY’S SECOND ADMINISTRATION.
A Commercial Crisis—Suspension of the Bank Act—The Fall of Lucknow—Sir Hugh Rose in Central India—Last Days of the Rebellion—The Operations in China—The Queen’s Personal Direction of Affairs—Palmerston’s waning Popularity—Attacks on Lord Canning—The Orsini Plot—French Menaces to England—The Conspiracy Bill—Defeat of the Ministry—The Second Derby-Disraeli Government—Abandonment of the Conspiracy Bill—The Queen’s Opposition to the India Bill—The Oudh Proclamation and Ellenborough’s “Secret Despatch”—A Tropical Summer and an Exhausted Legislature—Confirmation of the Prince of Wales—The Queen at Birmingham and Leeds—The Dispute between France and England about the Principalities—The Queen’s Visit to Cherbourg—The Royal Visit to Prussia—The Meeting with the Princess Frederick William—A Royal “Middie”—The Indian Proclamation—The Queen at Balmoral—Donati’s Comet—The Controversy over the Indian Army—Abdication of the King of Prussia—The Queen’s Letter to the Prince of Wales—France and Portugal—Failing Health of the Prince Consort.
Towards the end of 1857 the commercial credit of the country was severely shaken. The great railway companies in America sank under the burden of debenture debts: when they failed to pay their creditors, the banks were unable to give gold in exchange for their convertible issue of notes, and then private firms of the highest standing rapidly tumbled into insolvency. The effect of these disasters on English commercial credit was most serious. Houses engaged in American commerce that had been rashly over-trading on the capital of their creditors, fell in rapid succession, dragging down others in their fall. The Western Bank of Scotland stopped payment, and spread ruin far and wide through the districts of which Glasgow is the business centre. The failure of this establishment revealed the fact that gigantic frauds had been perpetrated by the auditors, who had certified the existence of a fictitious surplus of £2,000,000. A panic in Ireland, together with these disasters in Scotland, brought the crisis to a head in England. The sudden demand for gold at the Bank of England alarmed the Government, which, on the 12th of November, suspended the Bank Act, limiting the issue of notes.
It has been already mentioned that in 1847, when a similar course was adopted, the mere notification of it restored confidence, and the Bank did not take advantage of the licence granted to it. The crisis of 1857, however, was more serious, for fresh notes in excess of the legal issue were promptly put in circulation.[1] But the suspension of the Bank Charter Act by the Executive necessitated an application to Parliament for a Bill of Indemnity. Hence Parliament was summoned to meet on the 3rd of December. The Queen was under the impression that fresh light would be thrown on the crisis by the debates in both Houses; but there was really nothing new that could be said on the subject. As the Prince Consort observed in one of his letters, “Long prosperity had made all bankers, speculators, and capitalists careless, and now they are being unpleasantly reminded of natural laws which have been violated, and are asserting themselves.” Other matters besides the Indemnity Bill were mentioned in the Royal Speech; but, after passing that measure, Parliament separated on the 12th of January, 1858, to meet again on the 4th of February.
The business of suppressing the Mutiny was carried on vigorously in 1858. After Campbell’s victory over the Gwalior army at the end of 1857, he remained for two months at Cawnpore, whilst his reinforcements were coming to him, and the surrounding districts were being swept by flying columns. Then with an overwhelming force of artillery he moved forward swiftly to effect the final capture of Lucknow.[2] On the 4th of March the last of the siege train reached that city, and operations began in real earnest, ending with the capture of the third line of defence on the 14th of March. The place was virtually taken on the 15th; but most of the rebels had escaped. The Queen of Oudh, with 7,000 men, still clung to the Palace of the Moosee Bágh, and the fanatical Moulvee of Fyzabad yet held the heart of the city. Outram captured the Queen’s position, but not the Queen herself, whilst Sir Edward Lugard drove the Moulvee from his stronghold. Campbell’s loss was 177 killed and 505 wounded, and of the enemy 3,000 were buried, though no exact account of their wounded could be ascertained. On the 23rd of March General Grant overtook and routed a large body of fugitives on the road to Seetápoor, which brought operations to an end in this region.
The mutineers had now contrived to concentrate at Bareilly, with Khan Bahádoor Khan, Prince Féroze, of Delhi, the Queen of Oudh, the fanatical Moulvee, and the Nana Sahib of Bithoor, as leaders. Bareilly, however, suffered the fate of Lucknow, the leaders again escaping. The rebel Köer Singh was hunted out of Báhar and the jungle round Oudh, by Brigadier Douglas, after much harassing irregular fighting. During May and June the rebels contrived, greatly to the surprise of the Government, to concentrate in force at different places in the most unexpected manner. Driven out of the Upper Provinces, they tried to find refuge in the eastern Gangetic districts, but at every turn they were met and dispersed by flying columns told off to watch them.
It was, however, in Central India that the sword of vengeance was plied most ruthlessly. Sir Hugh Rose, with the army of Bombay and the Hyderabad Contingent, had, early in 1858, begun his march from Indore, hoping to reach Lucknow in time to take part in its capture. He had, however, to devote his attention to the insurgents of Central India, and conduct a campaign over the most rugged and difficult ground. He relieved Saugor on the 3rd of February. He invested the formidable fortress of Jhansi, the Ranee, or Queen, of which was, as Sir Hugh himself said, “the best man of the war.” On the 1st of April he defeated, in spite of great odds against him, a rebel army that attempted to raise the siege. On the 3rd he stormed a small breach in the walls, the Ranee effecting her escape into the jungle. On the 4th he carried the citadel, and took possession of the town. The investment was so complete that escape was impossible, and, as at the Secunderbund, the mutineers, to the number of 5,000, were all massacred.[3]
The Ranee of Jhansi and Tantia Topee had now concentrated an army of 20,000 men at Kalpi, and held an entrenched position at Kunch. Here, on the 7th of May, Rose defeated them, and his pursuit was so fierce and unresting that hardly a single fugitive escaped. Another rally was made at Kalpi, which was seized on the 23rd of May, the flying Sepoys being cut and shot down by hundreds, no quarter being given or taken. “Soldiers,” said Sir Hugh Rose, in his proclamation to the Central India Field Force, “you have marched more than a thousand miles, and taken more than a hundred guns; you have forced your way through mountain passes and intricate jungles, and over rivers; you have captured the strongest forts, and beat the enemy, no matter what the odds, wherever you met him; you have restored extensive districts to the Government, and peace and order now reign where before for twelve months were tyranny and rebellion; you have done all this, and you have never had a check.” Led by a dandy, who might almost be termed the Alcibiades of the Indian army, the Central India Field Force had carried fire and sword from the shores of Western India to the waters of the Jumna, and literally quenched the spirit of the insurrection in blood. But fresh work awaited Rose and his followers. Tantia Topee had organised a conspiracy against Scindia at Gwalior, whose contingent had, early in the Mutiny, revolted from his standard. Instead of waiting for British help, Scindia insisted on striking at the conspirators with such troops as he had still attached to his household. When he attacked the enemy at Barragaom, his followers deserted him, and he had to fly, with a small escort, to Dhólpoor, leaving the great fortress of Gwalior, with its vast stores of arms and munitions of war, to be occupied by the rebels. This gave fresh life to the Mutiny: the Nana Sahib promptly proclaimed himself Peishwa, and took the field with a new army of 18,000 men, strengthened by the superb artillery of Gwalior. But the news of this terrible misfortune did not daunt Sir Hugh Rose. He immediately resumed the command of the Central Field Force, which he had laid down, and made a dash for Gwalior. On the 16th of June he surprised the rebels at Morar, where he waited for one of his brigades, which came up on the 17th. He drove the enemy before him, like chaff before the wind, tearing them to pieces by fierce onsets of cavalry, in one of which a trooper of the 8th Hussars slew the dreaded Ranee of Jhansi, who fell fighting in male disguise. On the 18th the rebel army was in full retreat, and on the 20th Scindia took possession of his capital, the sack of which by the rebels cost him the loss of £500,000 of treasure, jewels, and other property. Nana Sahib’s broken army alone kept up a faint semblance of rebellion in Oudh towards the end of 1858.
Nor were British arms less fortunate elsewhere than in India. The operations at Canton, which had been suspended by the Mutiny, were successfully ended at the beginning of the year, a small French contingent acting as our allies against the Chinese. Commissioner Yeh was captured along with the city of Canton, in which Admiral Sir Michael Seymour established a provisional government. But the Imperial authorities affecting to consider the dispute a purely local one between the British Consul and the Imperial Commissioner, refused to come to terms. Lord Elgin accordingly crossed the bar of the Peiho river with a strong naval force, proclaiming his intention of attacking Pekin itself. The Imperial Government, therefore, made haste to conclude the Treaty of Tien-tsin on the 26th of June, which formed a new basis for British commercial intercourse with Eastern Asia.[4] The interest of the Queen in this achievement was heightened by the fact that the treaty was brought to her at Balmoral (20th of August), by Mr. Frederick Bruce, Lord Elgin’s younger brother and secretary, also brother to Colonel Bruce, governor to the Prince of Wales, and a confidential friend of the Royal Family. A Commercial Treaty with Japan followed, which completed the triumph of Lord Elgin’s energetic and adroit diplomacy.
THE FORTRESS OF GWALIOR.
Home and Foreign Affairs, however, brought more trouble and annoyance to the Queen than the operations of war in the East. In fact, at this period of her career, her Majesty found it more necessary than ever it had been to devote her best energies to the public service. In a conversation with Mr. Greville during the autumnal recess of 1857, Lord Clarendon said that “the manner in which the Queen in her own name, but with the assistance of the Prince, exercised her functions, was exceedingly good, and well became her position, and was eminently useful. She held each minister to the discharge of his duty and his responsibility to her, and constantly desired to be furnished with accurate and detailed information about all important matters, keeping a record of all the reports that were made to her, and constantly recurring to them; e.g., she would desire to know what the state of the navy was, and what ships were in readiness for active service, and generally the state of each, ordering returns to be submitted to her from all the arsenals and dockyards, and again weeks and months afterwards referring to these returns, and desiring to have everything relating to them explained and accounted for, and so throughout every department. In this practice Clarendon told me he had encouraged her strenuously. This is what none of her predecessors ever did, and it is in fact the act of Prince Albert, who is to all intents and purposes King, only acting entirely in her name. All his views and notions are those of a Constitutional Sovereign, and he fulfils the duties of one, and at the same time makes the Crown an entity, and discharges the functions which properly belong to the Sovereign. I told Clarendon that I had been told the Prince had upon many occasions rendered the most important services to the Government, and had repeatedly prevented them getting into scrapes of various sorts. He said it was perfectly true, and that he had written some of the ablest papers he had ever read.”[5]
The Queen, however, like the Prince Consort, was uneasy as to the stability of the Government. But she had erroneously formed an opinion, which was indeed shared by many others, that the danger to be apprehended was from the decay of Lord Palmerston’s health. “Clarendon,” writes Mr. Greville in November, 1857, “told me of a conversation he had recently with the Queen à propos of Palmerston’s health, concerning which her Majesty was very uneasy, and what could be done in the not impossible contingency of his breaking down. It is a curious change from what we saw a few years ago, that she has become almost affectionately anxious about the health of Palmerston, whose death might then have been an event to have been hailed with satisfaction. Clarendon said she might well be solicitous about it, for if anything happened to Palmerston, she would be placed in the greatest difficulty. She said that in such a case she should look to him, and expect him to replace Palmerston, on which Clarendon said he was glad she had broached the subject, as it gave him an opportunity of saying what he was very anxious to impress upon her mind, and that was, the absolute impossibility of his undertaking such an office, against which he enumerated various objections. He told her that Derby could not form a Government, and if she had the misfortune to lose Palmerston, nothing remained for her to do but to send for John Russell, and put him at the head of the Government. She expressed her great repugnance to this, and especially to make him Prime Minister. Clarendon then entreated her to conquer her repugnance, and to be persuaded that it would never do to offer him anything else, which he neither would nor could accept; that she necessarily was to have a man who could lead the House of Commons, and that there was no other but him; that Lord John had consented to take a subordinate office under Lord Aberdeen, who was his senior in age, and occupied a high position, but he would never consent to take office under him (Clarendon), and the proposal he would consider as an insult. For every reason, therefore, he urged her, if driven to apply to him at all, to do it handsomely, to place the whole thing in his hands, and to give him her full confidence and support. He appears to have convinced her that this is the proper course, and he gave me to understand that if Lord John acts with prudence and moderation all the present Government would accept him for their head.”[6]
The real danger, as will soon be seen, which menaced the Ministry was not Palmerston’s decaying health, but his waning popularity. The Party of Reform early in 1858 had become convinced that nothing was to be hoped for from him beyond empty and evasive promises. They were therefore, when Parliament reassembled on the 4th of February, simply waiting for a pretext to turn him out of office.[7] While the Radicals were mutinous, Mr. Disraeli, through the medium of Mr. C. Greville, was intriguing with the younger Whigs[8] to form a Coalition.[9] Palmerston had also incurred much unpopularity by appointing Lord Clanricarde to the office of Lord Privy Seal; in fact, it was known that this appointment would have been laid hold of as a pretext for moving a resolution which might destroy the Ministry. Of course, when Parliament met no division of opinion existed as to the propriety of passing addresses congratulating the Queen on her daughter’s marriage. But when, on the 8th of February, resolutions were moved thanking the civil and military officers in India for the ability with which they had dealt with the Mutiny, some of the Tories,[10] let us hope reluctantly, led by Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, made themselves the mouth-pieces of the “White Terror” at Calcutta, and opposed a vote of thanks to Lord Canning. His policy had been objected to because it was not sufficiently bloodthirsty; therefore, argued his critics, it was rash to pass a vote of thanks to him. The vote was carried, but it was clear that the Indian policy of the Government would bring trouble on their heads. The Indian government must be transferred to the Crown, and as Mr. Vernon Smith, a man of limited capacity, was the Minister responsible for India, the prospect was not thought by experienced Anglo-Indians to be an alluring one. We ought to wait till we had stamped out the last traces of the Mutiny, it was contended by Lord Ellenborough, before we brought India directly under the Government of the Queen. Still, Ministers defeated a resolution to postpone their India Bill, and nothing seemed fairer than their prospects, though they were even then (18th of February), on the brink of destruction. The blow came when Palmerston, desirous of conciliating the French Emperor, introduced a Bill to alter the Law of Conspiracy.
LORD CANNING.
The history of this fateful measure is as follows:—Ten days before the marriage of the Princess Royal, a small group of conspirators in England carried out a plan for assassinating the Emperor of the French in the Rue
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH.
Lepelletier, Paris, by exploding hand-grenades under his carriage. The Emperor and Empress escaped, but ten persons were killed, and 156 were wounded. The plot had been concocted by Felix Orsini in England. Therefore, the followers of the Emperor, whose fortunes depended on his life, denounced the English nation as Orsini’s accomplices. The Emperor himself was so unmanned by the incident, that after he drove home to the Tuileries, he and the Empress, on retiring to their room, wept bitterly over the wretched prospect before them. His terror probably prevented him from appreciating the fact, that if his own police could not protect him from Orsini, it was not likely that the police of a foreign country would be much more efficient. It may be, too, that the ease with which he had forced Palmerston to accept a humiliating settlement of the Question of the Principalities deluded him into the idea that it would be equally easy to compel him to restrict the freedom of Englishmen, in the interests of the Bonapartist dynasty.[11] He may also have imagined that England’s difficulties in the East would render Palmerston’s Government more complaisant than the Tory Ministry showed itself on this matter in 1853. His calculations, however arrived at, proved to be correct. The French Government addressed menaces on the subject of harbouring refugees to Sardinia, Switzerland, and Belgium. On the 20th of January Walewski wrote a despatch to Persigny, which he had to communicate to Lord Clarendon, and which not only accused England of deliberately sheltering the assassins of the French Emperor, but also asserted that the English Government ought to assist that of France, in averting “a repetition of such guilty enterprises.” Instead of answering this despatch in the high-spirited tone which Lord Malmesbury had taken in his conversation with the Emperor in 1853, a reply of a timid and indefinite character was privately sent through what was called the “usual official channels of personal communication.” The substance of it was that the Government needed no inducement to amend the English law of conspiracy, and that the Attorney-General had the matter in hand already. The assumption that the English Government was deliberately aiding and abetting a gang of assassins was an insult which Lord Palmerston, as the exponent of a spirited foreign policy, was expected to resent. His failure to resent it gave his enemies an opportunity of recalling his Civis Romanes Sum doctrine, and holding him up to contempt. But at first it was not known that he had shown the white feather in his dealings with the French Emperor. Addresses from the Army, burning with rancorous insults to England, had been presented to the Emperor, and published in the Moniteur. The Emperor finding that these insults, which were only intended for home consumption, had been republished in England, where he feared they might inflame popular feeling, instructed an expression of regret to be sent to the British Government. In introducing the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, Lord Palmerston (18th of February), carried the first reading by leading the House of Commons to believe that this Imperial apology was adequate. He did not think it worth while to explain that it had not been inserted in the Moniteur, where the insults and menaces of the French Colonels had appeared, and that the French people were thus fully under the delusion that their vaporous threats had coerced England into restricting the liberty of her subjects at their bidding. Later on, this deception was discovered. Walewski’s despatch, by an inconceivable blunder, was laid before the House, which also found out that it had never been answered with spirit and dignity. The anger of the Representatives of the people then rose to white heat; and when Mr. Milner Gibson moved a resolution of censure, which had been drafted by Sir J. Graham and Lord John Russell on the 19th of February, it was carried by a majority of 19, in a House of 459. Lord Palmerston and the Cabinet immediately resigned.
At first the Queen, knowing the difficulty of forming a new Government, was reluctant to accept their resignation. She contended—very properly—that it was a bad precedent for a Government to go out on the strength of a vote which was hardly constitutional. The treatment of a despatch was, in her Majesty’s opinion, purely a question for the Executive to decide. The House of Commons had but a very dubious right to touch it at all; at any rate, no Ministry was bound by the Constitution to resign because of a Vote of Censure from either House of Parliament on such a question.
There can be no doubt that the Queen’s view was the correct one, and it is now known that Lord Eversley, the ablest Speaker who has in her Majesty’s reign presided over the House of Commons, actually advised Mr. Speaker Denison to rule Mr. Gibson’s motion out of order, on the very grounds which seemed to the Queen to justify Lord Palmerston in ignoring the censure.[12] On the other hand, her Majesty had to admit the fact that Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon had been maladroit in their handling of the whole affair. They should have answered Walewski’s despatch more formally than in a private letter from Clarendon to Cowley. They ought at the outset to have pleaded the constitutional privilege of the Executive, and refusing to produce the despatch in Parliament, have challenged the Opposition to a vote of censure. Moreover, the Queen knew only too well by this time that if Palmerston refused to resign on Mr. Gibson’s motion, he would be turned out on one to abolish the office of Lord Privy Seal, Lord Clanricarde’s appointment to which had given great offence.[13] Thus, though it was in some respects objectionable to sanction a Ministerial resignation because the House of Commons censured, not the policy of the Government, but an administrative act of the Executive,[14] the Queen bent to circumstances, and sent for Lord Derby to form a Cabinet. Lord Derby, though he took office, did not desire it, because he could only reign on sufferance. His party, strictly speaking, was in a minority of about two to one in the House of Commons, and his Government would be at the mercy of casual combinations among the factions of the Opposition. He had to fall back on his old Administration (minus Sir E. B. Lytton).[15]
A painful quarrel between Sir E. B. Lytton and his wife had enlisted considerable public sympathy on the side of the lady, so that his re-election for Hertford was a little doubtful. When offered the Colonial Secretaryship, Sir E. B. Lytton gave Lord Derby a hint on the subject, and Lord Derby, under the impression that Sir E. B. Lytton considered his re-election impossible, induced Lord Stanley to accept the Colonial Office.[16] Lord Grey would have joined Lord Derby had it not been for his distrust of Mr. Disraeli; and he told Lady Tankerville that Mr. Gladstone would have also joined the new Ministry, “had he been offered the leadership of the Commons.”[17] If Lord Palmerston reckoned on the reluctance of the Queen to trust a Derby-Disraeli Ministry with the conduct of affairs, he fell into a grave error. Mr. Greville, who, like many politicians, held the Derby-Disraeli combination in contempt, admits that during this crisis the Queen’s conduct “was certainly curious, and justifies them in saying that it was by her express desire that Derby undertook the formation of the Government. If Palmerston and his Cabinet were actuated by the motives and expectations which I ascribe to them, her Majesty certainly did not play into their hands in that game. When Derby set before her all the difficulties of his situation, and entreated her again to reflect upon it, a word from her would have induced him (without having anything to complain of) to throw it back into Palmerston’s hands. But the word she did speak was decisive as to his going on, and there is no reason to believe that she was playing a deep game, and calculating on his favour. Nor do I believe that she would herself have liked to see Palmerston all-powerful. She can hardly have forgotten how inclined he has always been to abuse his power, and how much she has suffered from his exercise of it. Even when he was to a certain degree under control, and although she seemed to be quite reconciled to him, and to be anxious for the stability of his Government, it is difficult to know what her real feelings (or rather those of the Prince) were, and it is more than probable that her anxiety for the success of Palmerston’s Government was more on account of the members of it, whom she personally liked, and whom she was very reluctant to lose, than out of any partiality for the Premier himself. To Clarendon she is really attached, and Granville she likes very much; most of the rest she regards with indifference.”[18]
When the new Ministry took office they soon announced that they would drop the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, and answer the Walewski despatch. The
VIEW IN WINDSOR CASTLE: THE INNER CLOISTERS, LOOKING WEST.
temper of the English people was such as to render it impossible, after what had been said on both sides, to proceed with Lord Palmerston’s Bill. Moreover, Lord John Russell and Mr. Gladstone had put themselves at the head of 140 Members pledged to use all the forms of the House of Commons for the purpose of obstructing any measure of the sort, and the case was one where obstruction by keeping open a sore between two nations would soon render it an unhealable wound.[19] As for Walewski’s despatch, Mr. Milner Gibson’s motion had censured Lord Palmerston’s Government for not answering it, so Lord Palmerston’s successors, who had supported that motion, were bound to reply to it. Their difficulties were complicated by the foolish behaviour of De Persigny, the French Ambassador. He was a strong partisan of Palmerston’s, and he went about London drawing-rooms denouncing the Tory Government in the most violent terms. Nay, he made a practice of communicating to Lord Palmerston everything which passed between himself and Lord Malmesbury in their official conversations, and Lord Palmerston did not scruple to use information obtained by this dishonourable violation of diplomatic rules; nor did he shrink from making himself De Persigny’s accomplice in these questionable transactions. Lord Malmesbury felt himself so completely embarrassed by such proceedings that he caused Lord Cowley to privately inform the French Emperor that he must in future decline to transact business through De Persigny. Lord Malmesbury said plainly, that he must communicate directly through Lord Cowley or Count Walewski in Paris, for De Persigny at this time not only carried his confidential conversation to Palmerston, but Palmerston actually instructed him how to embarrass the English Government in attempting to resist dictatorial pressure from France. Lord Malmesbury’s spirited protest was well-timed and highly effective.[20] Acting through Lord Cowley, Lord Malmesbury arranged with Count Walewski a form of reply to the despatch which would adequately meet the demands of the English people, and yet give the French Government an opportunity of honourably repudiating any intention of wounding British susceptibilities. On hearing of this, Persigny, who had pledged himself to restore Palmerston to power by forcing the Tory Government to pass the Conspiracy Bill in a week, resigned. To his surprise and disgust his resignation was accepted, and Marshal Pélissier, Duke of Malakoff, was sent to England in his place. This was another triumph for the Tory Ministry, because Palmerston had reckoned on Walewski appointing Moustier, French Ambassador at Berlin, to the Court of St. James’s when Persigny resigned, and as Moustier was, like Walewski, virtually a Russian agent, fresh troubles would soon have been manufactured for Lord Malmesbury. Napoleon III., however, insisted on sending a personal representative, who from his Crimean services would not be unacceptable to the Queen and the English people. He, therefore, selected Pélissier,[21] who, though ignorant of diplomacy, was not likely to fall into Persigny’s indiscretions, and whose appointment was received by the Queen as a token of renewed goodwill on the part of France. This attempt of Palmerston’s to drive a Ministry from office by getting a Foreign Government to menace it with hostility,[22] having ended in ignominious defeat, he and his party soon showed how bitterly they resented the failure of their conspiracy with the French Emperor and his Ambassador against English liberty. When Mr. Disraeli announced the settlement of the quarrel with France in the House of Commons, on the 13th of March, the Opposition received it sullenly, and immediately raised a bitter attack on Lord Malmesbury for not procuring the release of the English engineers who were imprisoned in the Cagliari.[23] Their arrest was illegal, and Lord Malmesbury, as soon as he obtained the opinion of the law officers of the Crown, not only procured their release, but liberal compensation for the annoyance to which they had been put.
Where the Government broke down was in attempting to deal with the future administration of India; and it is a fact that had they but listened to the Queen’s advice, who strongly opposed their policy, they would have avoided a defeat which served to convince the people that the evil reputation of the Derby-Disraeli group for legislative incapacity was only too well founded. The Tories had opposed Palmerston’s India Bill, transferring the government of India to the Crown, so they were forced to bring in one of their own. Palmerston’s Indian Council consisted of nominated officials of high rank and ripe experience. The Tory Bill, which was devised by Lord Ellenborough, introduced into the Council a fantastic elective element. Four out of the Council of eighteen were to be chosen by holders of Indian Stock, and by Indian military and civil servants of ten years’ standing, and five were to be elected by the commercial constituencies of London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Belfast. The Queen warned the Cabinet that these provisions were fatal to their Bill. The selection of the constituencies was arbitrary, and other cities would in time agitate for representation on the Council. The turmoil of democratic elections was not likely to influence for good Imperial policy in a country about which the electors could at best know little. But the Cabinet held that the electoral clauses would secure the Radical support necessary to carry the Bill, and the Queen, reluctant to bring about another Ministerial crisis, left the matter in the hands of her Ministers. But when Mr. Disraeli, on the 26th of March, introduced the Bill, to his surprise, the Radicals objected as strongly as the Queen to the electoral clauses. Mr. Roebuck complained that they gave a sham colour of democracy to what was really a despotic Government. Mr. Bright said they “savoured of what was generally called claptrap.” Anxious, however, to keep the Tories in power, lest Lord Palmerston and his followers might return to office, the Radicals refused to embarrass Mr. Disraeli[24] on this point, and urged the Government to reconsider it during the Easter recess. Most assiduously did Lady Palmerston endeavour to induce Lord John Russell to coalesce with Lord Palmerston during the recess for the purpose of defeating the Ministry on the India Bill; but her intrigues were in vain. On the contrary, Lord John determined to bring in a series of Resolutions on which the Ministry might base a Bill, and when Parliament re-assembled on the 12th of April he confidentially communicated them through Mr. Edward Horsman to Mr. Disraeli, who had himself resolved to adopt the same course. Mr. Disraeli was only too willing to be thus extricated from a difficulty by one of the leaders of the Opposition. But the House of Commons considered that as the India Bill was now removed from the arena of party strife, it would be wisest to let the Government prepare the Resolutions. This was done, and the debate on them began on the 30th of April, and went on favourably.
The Budget, though it showed a deficit of £4,000,000, which was met by a tax on bankers’ cheques, and by equalising the Irish spirit duty, gave the Ministry no trouble. The acquittal of Dr. Bernard in April, who had been arrested by Lord Palmerston’s Government on a charge of conspiring with Orsini to murder the French Emperor, embarrassed Lord Malmesbury, for the jury who tried Bernard refused to convict in the teeth of clear evidence of guilt. But Napoleon III., recognising that the action of the jury was simply the “retort courteous” to Walewski’s maladroit demand that an English Government should alter English laws at the bidding of a foreign autocrat, wisely ignored the incident, and accepted Pélissier’s view of it, which was that “one must be callous to this sort of thing, and let the water run under the bridge.”[25] Then the tide of Ministerial success suddenly turned, and the Cabinet was nearly wrecked by the indiscretion of its most brilliant but erratic member, Lord Ellenborough, who had succeeded Mr. Vernon Smith at the Indian Board of Control.
In 1857 Lord Canning had incurred the odium of panic-stricken Englishmen at Calcutta, because in his repressive measures he mingled justice with severity. In June, 1857, when he gagged the Native press, he gagged the English press as well. In August, when disarming Calcutta, he compelled
THE QUEEN’S VISIT TO BIRMINGHAM: THE PROCESSION PASSING ALONG NEW STREET.
Europeans, as well as Natives, to take out licences to carry arms, and in July he issued orders to stop the indiscriminate slaughter of mutineers, distinguishing between the cases of those whose guilt was of varying degrees of intensity. A storm of abuse accordingly broke over his head, and the English in Calcutta petitioned for the recall of “Clemency Canning.” The British army in India, with its reinforcements, was but a handful of men among millions. Indiscriminate proscription of the Natives, such as was clamoured for, would have driven the whole of India into mutiny; in other words, it would have cost England her Indian Empire. The Queen and the Cabinet, however, supported Canning, and matters went well with him for a time. But in the spring of 1858, when Lucknow fell, another attack was made on him from a different point of view. He had drawn up a proclamation confiscating the lands of all landowners in Oudh save those who had been loyal to England, and those who would immediately return to their allegiance, and help to put down the rebellion. Lord Ellenborough, ignoring the saving clauses in the proclamation, sent Canning a “Secret Despatch,” bitterly condemning the apostle of “clemency” as a heartless tyrant, and even casting doubts upon the title by which Oudh was held by England. He permitted the Secret Despatch to be made public; and, what was still worse, Mr. Disraeli, with singular lack of patriotism, proclaimed in the House of Commons that the Government disapproved of Canning’s policy. Such a declaration, made at such a moment, was almost as mischievous as if the Government had telegraphed out to India, that they desired the Natives to organise another revolt.
The Queen’s indignation at the conduct of both Ministers was not diminished by the fact that neither of them had waited to receive Canning’s despatch, explaining at length the reasons for his policy. Notices of resolution, censuring the Ministry, were given in both Houses, and one member of the Cabinet (Lord Malmesbury) wrote personally to Lord Canning, begging him, on behalf of his colleagues, not to quit his post. The defeat of the Government, in fact, was only averted by the sacrifice of Ellenborough, who, to “save his colleagues, volunteered to play the part of Jonah.”[26] Mr. Gladstone was offered his place by Lord Derby, but on his refusing to join the Government, Lord Stanley became Ellenborough’s successor, Sir E. B. Lytton going to the Colonial Office. Yet in view of Mr. Disraeli’s denunciation of Canning’s policy, even Ellenborough’s resignation would not have saved the Ministry, had it not been that the Radicals and Peelites, along with Lord John Russell, refused to carry the matter farther, because, as they frankly said, they did not desire to let Palmerston and his faction return to power.[27]
On the 17th of June the India Bill, based on the resolutions of the Government, and vesting the sole dominion of India in the Crown, was introduced by Lord Stanley, and it passed into law on the 2nd of August.
Another measure was passed in July, though opposed rather venomously by the Tories in the House of Lords—namely, the Bill providing that either House might resolve that henceforth Jewish members of Parliament might omit from the Parliamentary Oath the words, “and I make this declaration on the true faith of a Christian.” This ended a long and bitter controversy. On the 26th of July Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild came to the table of the House of Commons, and was sworn on the Old Testament, the House having agreed to resolutions in terms of the new Act.[28]
The exceptional heat of the summer soon exhausted the energies of legislators. Mephitic odours from the Thames even caused some to demand that the Houses of Parliament should be shifted to another site. “We have,” writes Lord Malmesbury, on the 27th of June, “ordered large quantities of lime to be thrown into the Thames; for no works can be begun till the hot weather is over. The stench is perfectly intolerable, although Madame Ristori, coming back one night from a dinner at Greenwich, given by Lord Hardwicke, sniffed the air with delight, saying it reminded her of her ‘dear Venice.’” Perhaps this nuisance induced the House of Commons to pass with unlooked for rapidity a Main Drainage Bill, which was to prevent sewage from being turned into the Thames as it passed through London. All intrigues set on foot to reconcile Lord Palmerston to Lord John Russell,[29] and the Radicals to both, failed, so the Tory Ministry successfully weathered the storms of faction, and closed the Session, on the whole, with credit, on the 30th of July.
The family life of the Court had been brightened early in the year by the cordial welcome which the Queen’s eldest daughter had received in her new home in Prussia. Projects for a visit to her and her husband were formed by the Queen and the Prince Consort, which public duty compelled them to abandon month after month. On Maundy Thursday the Prince of Wales was confirmed at Windsor, having acquitted himself well during his examination by the Archbishop. After a fortnight’s tour in Ireland, it was arranged that he should live in the White Lodge, Richmond Park, and prepare for his military examination, his companions being Lord Valletort, eldest son of Lord Mount-Edgecumbe, Major Teesdale, R.E., one of the heroes of Kars, Major R. Loyd-Lindsay (afterwards Lord Wantage), V.C., and Mr. Gibbs, the Prince’s tutor. In May a visit from the beautiful Queen of Portugal charmed all hearts, and during the Whitsuntide holiday, when the Prince Consort went to pay a flying visit to Coburg, the Queen solaced her loneliness by visiting Prince Alfred at Alverbank, a cottage opposite the Isle of Wight, where he was pursuing his naval studies. Delightful letters came to the Queen from Babelsberg, describing the married happiness of her daughter, who received the Prince Consort there, and from whence he returned to London on the 8th of June.
On the 14th, her Majesty paid her promised visit to Birmingham, and to Lord Leigh at Stoneleigh Abbey. It was smiling summer weather when she drove from Coventry through Shakespeare’s country to her host’s house, where
VISIT OF THE QUEEN TO THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH AT CHERBOURG.
she was delighted with her reception. Next day she went by train to Birmingham, when, wonderful to relate, the sun shone through a smokeless though sultry atmosphere. As for the arrangements for her reception, she writes, “all was admirably done—handsomer even than Manchester. The cheering was tremendous.” Loyal addresses were presented at the Town Hall, where, seated on an extemporised throne, her Majesty knighted the Mayor. The Royal Party next proceeded to Aston Hall and Park, “now to be converted,” writes the Queen, “into a People’s Museum and Park, and to obtain which the working people had worked very hard, and subscribed very largely.” Here six of the working men associated with the managers of the proceedings were presented to the Queen, who conversed with them affably, and then proclaimed the Park open. “Quite a pattern lady!” “What a darling!”—such were among the exclamations, writes the Queen, with which she was greeted by the crowd. After visiting many places of interest in the district, the Queen returned to Buckingham Palace on the 16th, greatly impressed with the welcome she had received from the most democratic and republican community in England. This visit had a marked political influence. It gave a great though unseen impetus to the movement for Reform, and many thoughtful Conservatives now began to suspect that there was less danger in giving votes to the loyal artizans of Birmingham, than to the lower middle class whom the Whigs desired to enfranchise.
OSBORNE HOUSE.
(From a Photograph by J. Valentine and Sons, Dundee.)
OSBORNE HOUSE.
(From a Photograph by J. Valentine and Sons, Dundee.)
In May the Emperor of the French had sent the Queen an invitation to come and inspect the fortifications at Cherbourg. At this time the friction between France and England had been somewhat increased by a divergence of view between the two countries as to the settlement of the Danubian Principalities. England, by opposing their union, had irritated France. France, by refusing to admit that the engagements entered into by Napoleon III. at Osborne in 1857 bound her to support the English view, had annoyed England.[30] It was, however, thought that the Queen’s personal popularity in France, and her influence with the Emperor, might bring about friendlier relations between the Governments, and the Ministry pressed her to accept the Imperial invitation. Writing on the 5th of August, the day after the Queen’s arrival at Cherbourg, Lord Malmesbury, who was one of her party, says, “It blew hard in the night, but subsided towards morning. The Queen not ill. The approach to Cherbourg very fine. Arrived there at 7 p.m. At 8 the Emperor and Empress came on board the Royal yacht without any suite. Nobody was admitted. Marshal Pélissier, who went in without any invitation, was immediately turned out by the Emperor.” What passed at this interview, however, was an embarrassing inquiry about the feeling against France in England. “We smiled,” writes the Queen of herself and her husband, “and said the feeling was much better, but that this very place caused alarm, and that those unhappy addresses of the Colonels had done incalculable mischief.” The grand effect of the saluting cannon seems to have impressed the Queen, and, says Lord Malmesbury, “when the Emperor left the Queen’s yacht, the electric light was thrown on the Emperor’s barge, following it the whole way into the harbour; the light shining only on the barge, whilst all around remained in darkness.” The Emperor, adds Lord Malmesbury, “was very friendly in his manner; but both he and the Empress could not digest some of the articles in the Times which had been offensive, especially against her, and I tried to make them understand what freedom the Press had in England, and how independent it was of all private and most public men.” As for the Queen, she says in her Diary that, after this grave visit she “went below,” and “read and nearly finished that most interesting book ‘Jane Eyre.’” On the morrow thunderous salutes smote her ears as she was dressing, and when she went on deck the harbour was literally swarming with craft brave with gala array. “Next morning,” writes Lord Malmesbury of this day’s proceedings, “the Queen, Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Sir John Pakington, and myself breakfasted at the Préfecture. After which the Royal Personages drove over the town.... Returned to the Royal yacht, and accompanied the Queen to dinner on board the Bretagne. Among the officers at dinner was General Macmahon.” Here the Queen was rendered very nervous because Prince Albert had to make a complimentary speech in reply to the toast of her health, for at that moment every eye in Europe was on Cherbourg, and every ear straining for echoes of Royal and Imperial conversations on which might hang the dread issues of war. “I shook so,” writes the Queen, “that I could not drink my cup of coffee.”[31] All went off well, however, and the kindliest words on both sides were spoken. The display of 25,000 francs’ worth of fireworks ended a brilliant but fatiguing day. August 6th was devoted to leave-taking, amidst a complimentary cannonade, and the Queen got home in time to greet Prince Alfred on his birthday at Osborne. “The evening,” she writes, “was very warm and calm. Dear Affie was on the pier, and we found all the other children, including Baby (Princess Beatrice), standing at the door.” A visit of inspection to Prince Alfred’s birthday presents, a little birthday fête and dance on the terrace, adds the Queen, formed “a delightful finale to our expedition.”[32] But the visit was a mistake, though, as the Ministry insisted on it, the blame was theirs alone. It produced an abundant crop of alarms and attacks in the press on the menacing preparations for war which had been seen at Cherbourg. It caused the Queen to have a controversy with Lord Derby, who would pay no heed to her appeal to provide a counterpoise to the threatening stronghold which she had inspected.
A visit—long promised and long looked for—to the Prince and Princess Frederick William of Prussia followed. Her Majesty’s suite arrived at Potsdam on the 14th of August, and on the same evening the Queen and Prince Albert arrived at Babelsberg, where they were received with a warmth of welcome by their Prussian relatives that made the Queen, as she herself says, feel as if she were at home. The meeting between her and her daughter brought a moment of supreme delight to both. Each day spent in the happy circle of the Prince and Princess of Prussia seems to have knit the heart of the Queen closer to the family of which her eldest daughter was so obviously a cherished member. Every day some fresh mark of attention was paid to the Queen and her husband by their hosts, who seemed to exhaust their ingenuity in devising expedients for making her visit pleasant to her. Though this visit was purely a private one, the people gave her as cordial a reception as the Court, until at last her Majesty began to feel sad at the approaching termination of such a charming holiday. But on the 28th of August the last day came, and, writes the Prince Consort, “the parting was very painful.” The Queen and the Princess Royal wept in each other’s arms, though her Majesty says, with a pathetic reference to the conflicting duties of sovereignty and womanhood, “all would be comparatively easy were it not for the one thought that I cannot be with her at that very critical moment when every mother goes to her child.”[33] Dover was reached on the 31st, from whence the Queen went on to Portsmouth, and thence to Osborne, where they found Prince Alfred, who had passed his examination—especially the mathematical part of it—with great distinction, eager to tell them he had been appointed to the Euryalus. He was waiting for his mother, writes the Queen, “in his middie’s jacket, cap, and dirk, half-blushing, and looking very happy. He is a little pulled down from these three days’ hard examination, which only terminated to-day.... We felt very proud, for it is a particularly hard examination.”[34]
POTSDAM.
Only one anxiety had intruded itself during the Prussian tour—the issue of the Queen’s Proclamation to the Indian people on assuming the government of India. She objected strongly to the draft of it which was submitted to her, and begged Lord Derby to write one out for her in “his own excellent language,” keeping in view “that it is a female Sovereign who speaks to more than a hundred millions of Eastern people on assuming the direct government over them after a bloody civil war, giving them pledges which her future reign is to redeem.” Such a Proclamation should, says her Majesty, emphasise the ideas of generosity, benevolence, religious toleration, liberty, and equality before the law. What offended her deeply in the draft was a menace reminding the Indian people that she had “the power of undermining” native religions and customs. Her Majesty, writes Lord Malmesbury by her directions, “would prefer that the subject should be introduced by a declaration in the sense that the deep attachment which her Majesty feels to her own religion, and the comfort and happiness which she derives from its consolations, will preclude her from any attempt to interfere with native religions.” The name of the official personage who drew up this blundering and exasperating Proclamation, which the Queen had the good sense and good taste to cancel, need not be mentioned. It is but just to Lord Derby to say that when the Queen’s objections were telegraphed to him he examined the document, and so completely agreed with her Majesty that he re-wrote the Proclamation in a manner that anticipated her detailed instructions. A few additions were made to it by the Queen, and when it was issued it was hailed with delight by the Natives as the Magna Charta of India.
THE QUEEN LEAVING THE TOWN HALL, LEEDS.
On the 6th of September the Queen and Prince Albert proceeded to Leeds to open the splendid Town Hall which the people of that borough had built, and where they were welcomed by the most picturesque Mayor in England, who in his robes and bearing, wrote the Queen, was “the personification of a Venetian Doge.” Needless to say then that, after the Hall was opened, Mr. Mayor Fairbairn was knighted. The Royal Family next sped northwards to Balmoral, where Prince Albert brought down his first stag on the 14th, and where the whole household gazed nightly at Donati’s comet, which blazed with peculiar brilliancy in the clear and “nimble air” of the Highlands. Among the superstitious mountaineers it was held to be a portent of war and pestilence. At Balmoral the Queen became involved in a discussion with her Ministers as to the future of the Indian Army. Who was to command it—the Queen through the British Commander-in-Chief, or the Queen through the Secretary of State in Council, as successors to the old East India Company and Board of Control? Her Majesty stoutly contended that the union between the British and Indian Armies should be completed by their being placed under the same supreme authority—namely, the Commander-in-Chief in India. The Indian Council grasping at patronage, however, held that though the Commanders-in-Chief in the Presidencies should not be subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief in India, except in respect of the Queen’s troops under their order, over the Native troops in their presidencies their authority must be supreme. Lord Clyde took the Queen’s view of the matter, and so did General Peel, War Secretary, and also the Prince Consort, and in 1860, when the controversy ended, it was her view that prevailed. Towards the end of the Balmoral holiday the Queen and her husband were greatly delighted to find that their much-loved friend, the Prince of Prussia, had finally been chosen Prince Regent in succession to his brother, the king, who had become too infirm in mind and body to hold the reins of Government. The Prince Regent (afterwards German Emperor) and Prince Albert were not only warm friends, but were in close confidential correspondence on public affairs, and the Queen and her husband alike looked to him as the only possible deliverer of Prussia from Absolutist Administrations dominated by Russian ascendency. Their counsels had a powerful influence on the Prussian Regent’s policy at the outset of his career, when he dismissed the Manteuffel Ministry, and initiated an era of moderate constitutional progress in his country. Indirectly, they conferred a marked benefit on this country at the same time. The foreign policy of Prussia, which had up till now seemed to be antipathetic to England, changed. Without abating any of their zeal for their respective interests, the Foreign Offices of the two countries found it much easier than it had been to work together in matters of general interest. This cordiality between the Courts of Berlin and St. James’s was promoted by the kindness which the Prince Regent bestowed on the Prince of Wales when, in November, he proceeded to Berlin to visit his sister. He returned, not only bearing with him a confidential letter from the Prince Regent to his father, but with it the Order of the Black Eagle, which had been, greatly to his delight, bestowed upon him. He had just completed his eighteenth year, and had been promoted to a colonelcy in the army. Colonel Bruce was now his governor—his tutor, Mr. Gibbs, having retired. The Prince had, in fact, become emancipated from pupilage, and Mr. Greville referring to this event says in his “Memoirs,” “I hear the Queen has written a letter to the Prince of Wales announcing to him his emancipation from parental authority and control, and that it is one of the most admirable letters ever penned. She tells him that he may have thought the rule they adopted for his education a severe one, but that his welfare was their only object; and well knowing to what seductions of flattery he would eventually be exposed, they wished to prepare and strengthen his mind against them, that he was now to consider himself his own master, and that they should never intrude any advice upon him, although always ready to give it him whenever he thought fit to seek it. It was a very long letter all in that line, and it seems to have made a profound impression on the Prince, and to have touched his feelings to the quick. He brought it to Gerald Wellesley in floods of tears, and the effect it produced is a proof of the wisdom which dictated its composition.”[35]
A fresh cause of disagreement had, however, now arisen with France. The seizure of a French slaver, called the Charles-et-Georges, by the Portuguese authorities at Mozambique, tempted the French Government to demand its surrender, and an indemnity whilst her status was sub judice. Coercion was threatened by the appearance of a French squadron in the Tagus, and an offer on the part of Portugal to submit to arbitration was refused. Englishmen in these circumstances gave vent to much indignation against a revival of the old brutal methods of Bonapartism in dealing with a small Power, and this indignation was shared by the Queen, though it was prudently veiled, her personal relations with the Portuguese Court being of an unusually cordial character. Lord Malmesbury was also well known not only to be a partisan of the French alliance, but a personal friend of the French Emperor. This led many to suspect that the British Government had played into the hands of France; and Lord Malmesbury’s policy was, in truth, so spiritless in defence of Portugal, that the Portuguese, fearing to waste time in appealing for the good offices of England, yielded to the overbearing menaces of France. At the same time, it is quite clear, from a sentence in one of the Prince Consort’s letters to Baron Stockmar, that the Court, on the whole, approved of the Foreign Secretary’s policy, which, at all events, kept the country clear of war. The loyal reception of the Queen’s Proclamation in India on the 17th of October, and the end of the rebellion in Oudh, gladdened the closing months of 1858. Over these, however, the first symptoms of the Prince Consort’s failing health projected the slowly-advancing shadow, that was so soon to shroud the remainder of the Queen’s career in widowed sorrow.
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.
Napoleon’s New Year’s Reception—The Secret pacte de famille—Victor Emmanuel and the Grido di Dolore—The Queen’s Views on the Italian Movement—The Queen’s Letter to Napoleon—Meeting of Parliament—Cavour Threatens Napoleon—Appeal of Prussia to the Queen for Advice—Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill—Lord John Russell’s Amendment—Defeat of the Government—An Appeal to the Country—The Queen Criticises Austria’s Blunders—War at Last—The General Election—Reconciliation of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell—Fall of the Derby-Disraeli Administration—The Palmerston-Russell Ministry—Austrian Defeats and French Victories—The Peace of Villafranca—Palmerston Duped—Illness of the Duchess of Kent—The Budget—The Queen and Palmerston—Triumph of the Queen’s Policy—The Holiday at Balmoral—Dancing in the New Year.
Not easily will the world forget the New Year’s Day of 1859. “I regret,” said the French Emperor to Baron Hubner, the Austrian Ambassador, at the reception at the Tuileries, “that the relations between our two countries are not more satisfactory; but I beg you to assure the Emperor (of Austria) that they in no respect alter my feelings of friendship to himself.” Taken in connection with the rumoured results of Continental intrigues, but one interpretation could be put on these words. The restlessness of France was to be appeased by a war for the deliverance of Italy from the Hapsburgs, and the bombs of Orsini had forced the Emperor to be faithful to his forgotten engagements to his old comrades among the Carbonari. The Emperor’s own story was that he felt convinced there could be no peace in Europe unless the Territorial Settlement of 1815 was revised. He professed to have aimed at effecting that object by the regeneration of Poland. The Crimean War having, however, proved this scheme to be futile, his policy was thenceforth directed to the deliverance of Italy from Austrian servitude. In either case the waters of diplomacy would be troubled, and it would be easy to fish out of them something that might partially compensate France for what she lost in 1815. But the truth was that, at his secret interview with Count Cavour, at Plombières, in the autumn of 1858, the Emperor had entered into an engagement to defend Piedmont, if attacked by Austria, and to establish under the Sardinian Crown a Kingdom of Northern Italy, the price for this aid being the cession of Savoy and Nice to France. At this meeting the marriage of Prince Napoleon to the Princess Clothilde, daughter of the King of Italy, was discussed, but not definitely arranged. The announcement of the coming marriage was, however, made to the Queen by the French Emperor on the 31st of December, 1858. On the 23rd of January, 1859, the formal request for the Princess Clothilde’s hand was made. On the 30th the wedding was celebrated, and on the 3rd of February the Prince and Princess Napoleon returned to Paris. On the evening before the marriage, Napoleon III. was said to have signed a pacte de famille, promising aid offensive and defensive to Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel pledging himself to cede to France Savoy and Nice, in return for territorial acquisitions in Lombardy.[36] Thus the French Emperor was bound to Sardinia as with “hoops of steel,” when the European crisis in 1859 became acute, and Lord Malmesbury imagined that he could compose it by diplomacy.
VICTOR EMMANUEL.
After the Imperial declarations to Baron Hubner, Victor Emmanuel, on the 10th of January, in his Address to his Parliament, had said, “While we respect treaties, we are not insensible to the cry of suffering (Grido di dolore) which comes to us from so many parts of Italy.” Austrian troops forthwith began to swarm into the passes of the Tyrol, and to form on the line of the Ticino. Russia encouraged France to the utmost, and from conversations with Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon during their visit in autumn to Compiègne, the French Emperor felt convinced that the powerful party in England, led by Palmerston, would give him that moral support which the Queen and her Ministers denied him.[37] The Courts of St. James’s and Berlin were cold friends to the cause of Italian freedom. To them any war which upset the Settlement of 1815 was like the letting out of waters. The victory of either party could bode no good for Prussia, under whose leadership the Queen was even then hopeful that Germany would yet form a united Empire. The triumph of the Hapsburgs would strengthen their position in Germany, and as Herr von Bismarck said, this must mean that “our Kings will again become Electors and vassals of Austria.”[38] The victory of France, on the other hand, would tempt Napoleon III. to seize Belgium and the Rhine Provinces.
In Germany public opinion was, on the whole, pro-Austrian. In England, popular feeling, stimulated by the Liberal Party, was decidedly Anti-Austrian. The view of the Tory Ministry was that of Lord Malmesbury, who thought that it was as wicked to dispute the right of Austria to her Italian provinces, as to question that of England to Ireland. Frenchmen, again, were as little inclined to go to war for “an idea” in Lombardy as in the Crimea.
It would be tedious to follow the tangled skein of intrigue that finally ended in war. At the outset the advantage lay with Austria, because if she had struck quickly and sharply she might have crushed Sardinia, ere France could have come to her rescue. Protracted negotiation deprived Austria of this advantage, so Napoleon III. welcomed the proposal of England to find a diplomatic solution of the Italian Question—all the more readily that his failure to obtain pledges of absolute neutrality from England and Prussia, caused him to waver from his purpose. It was in the hope that he might be induced, when in this state of mind, to insert a pacific clause in his address to the Chambers, that the Queen, on the 4th of February, wrote to him suggesting this course,[39] in a letter thanking him for his congratulations on the birth of the Princess Royal’s son. Napoleon’s reply was friendly but evasive. He professed great friendship for England, and respect for treaties, but virtually reserved to himself the right to interpret them in his own interests. So matters stood at the beginning of the Session of 1859.
Parliament had been called together on the 5th of February. Ministers were undoubtedly discredited by a popular suspicion that they were using the influence of England to buttress up Austrian tyranny in Italy. The impartial impotence of Lord Malmesbury’s policy, as subsequently revealed in his despatches, however, showed that these suspicions were unfounded. The question of Reform had been stirred during the autumnal recess by Mr. Bright. But his violent attacks on the propertied classes had roused the fiercest antagonism, and probably did more to retard than advance the cause he had at heart. Yet the Government could not afford to dispense with the support of the Party of Parliamentary Reform, and so Mr. Disraeli’s determination to deal with the question was intimated in the Queen’s Speech. Lord Granville, Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell, though speaking less hopefully than Mr. Disraeli of the efforts of the Government to preserve peace, alike deprecated a war for the expulsion of Austria from North Italy, where her position was secured to her by the Treaty of 1815. But they argued that she had no right to go beyond that Treaty, and that the presence of Austrian and French armies in Central Italy, on which they imposed a government that was hateful to the people, was most dangerous to the peace of the world. The Emperor’s speech to the French Chambers, as the Prince Consort said, was “meant to look peaceful”—but that was all. “Not a word,” wrote Lord Malmesbury “is said about Treaties, but a good deal about the interests and honour of France.”[40] Indeed, Victor Emmanuel and Cavour fancied they detected in it signs of wavering. The former threatened to abdicate, and the latter to resign, after disclosing to the world the secret compact of Plombières and the pacte de famille, signed on the eve of the Princess Clothilde’s marriage. This threat, together with Cavour’s Mephistophelean allusions to the vengeance of the Carbonari, invariably brought the Emperor back to his original resolve, and defeated the efforts of British diplomacy to avert war. Meanwhile, the Prince Regent William had been pressed by the French Emperor to hold aloof from Austria. Rival parties in Prussia were trying to drag him in contrary directions, and at last he appealed confidentially to his friends, the Queen and the Prince Consort, for advice, saying, “I anxiously await your answer, for it will be decisive for us.”[41] It is important to study this correspondence, because at the time the Queen and Prince Consort were denounced in many quarters, where French influence was at work, for intriguing through the Courts of Berlin and Brussels to get up a great German League against the liberties of Italy. England, replied the Prince Consort, would not now go with France, no matter how far Austria put herself in the wrong. Prussia would be well advised, thought the Prince, to take the same line. In the meantime, let German public opinion, of which Napoleon stood much in awe, on the question, be elicited by encouraging the freest discussion in Germany, and when the crisis came, let that opinion guide Prussia. Prussia and the German States, the Prince Consort thought, should adopt an attitude of armed neutrality—ready to strike a blow for the protection of the Rhine provinces before a victorious France could quite clear her hands of a defeated Austria. Prussia and Germany, argues the Prince in another letter, owe no duty to Austria in respect of Italy. But Austria owes them a duty as a German State bound to assist in the defence of Germany from French aggression. Ere Prussia sided with Austria, an Austrian army must be ready to advance on the Rhine, and Germany must be permitted to exercise a distinct influence on Austrian policy in Italy. The Prince Regent of Prussia treated the Prince Consort’s views as “decisive,” and, as will be subsequently seen, by acting on them he not only increased the influence of Prussia in Germany, but virtually brought the war between France and Austria to a sudden close. In the meantime, Parliament, with great generosity and patriotic spirit, refused to embarrass Ministers by debating the Italian Question, and at the request of the French Emperor, Lord Cowley was sent to Vienna to mediate between France and Austria.
On the 28th of February Mr. Disraeli expounded his Reform Bill, the adoption of which compelled Mr. Walpole and Mr. Henley to retire from the Cabinet. The great blunder of the Whig Reform Bill of 1832 was that it excluded the working classes—without whose support the Bill could never have been forced on the Crown—from political power. The object of a practical Reform Bill was therefore simple. It was to lower the franchise, so as to give votes to the working classes, and then readjust the distribution of power in the constituencies in terms of this reduced franchise. Mr. Disraeli, however, produced a fantastic scheme, in which every concession given with the right hand was taken back with the left. The county franchise was reduced to £10, but then as a set-off the freeholders in towns were no longer to vote for the counties. The franchise in towns was not reduced, but a series of what Mr. Bright called “fancy franchises’ was created, with a view to render the representation of “interests” predominant.[42] Certain constituencies were to have additional members, and some small boroughs with two members were to lose one. Nobody was satisfied with the measure, so Lord John Russell on the 10th of March gave notice that he would move an amendment to the motion for the Second Reading, condemning the disturbance of the freehold franchise, and demanding a greater extension of the suffrage than Mr. Disraeli contemplated. All sections of the Opposition were able to vote for the resolution. Lord John Russell, who imagined he enjoyed a monopoly of the question of Reform, and that nobody should deal with it but himself, wanted to carry the Resolution and reject the Bill. Lord Palmerston was willing to vote for the Resolution and go on with the Bill. “I do not,” he said, “want them [the Ministry] to resign. I say to them, as I think Voltaire said of a Minister who had incurred his displeasure, ‘I won’t punish him; I won’t send him to prison; I condemn him to keep his place.’” Mr. Gladstone refused
THE GUARD-ROOM, ST. JAMES’S PALACE. (From a Photograph by H. N. King.)
to support the Resolution, because he said he wanted the question of Reform settled, and it would be quite possible to re-model the Bill in Committee, and Mr. Roebuck took the same view. Mr. Bright, however, thinking that any settlement arrived at in 1859 would be too favourable to the territorial interest, supported the Resolution in order to quash the Bill. Sir James Graham, who had drafted the Resolution, made by far the most statesmanlike speech 111 the debate. He argued that it was of no use to lower the borough franchise unless it were reduced so that no further reduction could be demanded, and suggested that the municipal rating franchise would be the best to adopt. On the 1st of April the Government by this coalition of factions was defeated by a vote of 330 to 291, and, undeterred by Lord Palmerston’s threat to stop supplies, Mr. Disraeli on the 4th of the month intimated that the Ministry would appeal to the country.
Partisans of the Government had attempted to make capital out of the disturbed state of the Continent, and had spoken as if it were wicked to oppose a bad Reform Bill at a time when Lord Malmesbury was mediating between armed nations. As a matter of fact, Lord Malmesbury was only permitted to amuse himself with futile mediation, which was to be protracted till France was ready to attack Austria, and Austria was lured into an attack on Piedmont, that would give France an excuse for fulfilling the secret compact with Cavour at Plombières. When Lord Cowley returned from Vienna he brought the assent of Austria (1), to withdraw her troops from the Roman States; (2), to support a reforming policy in Italy; and (3), to promise not to assail Sardinia. His mission would have been successful had not Napoleon in the meantime manufactured failure for it. He gave a hint to Russia which caused her to propose a Congress for the settlement of all questions at issue between France and Austria, and Lord Cowley’s plans were put out of the field. A Congress, by protracting negotiations, exposed Austria to the exhausting drain of her armaments, whilst France was perfecting her arrangements for falling upon her. Time, too, might bring about a change of Ministry in England, where the substitution of a warm ally like Lord Palmerston for a Tory Cabinet whose sympathies were, if anything, in favour of Austria, would be an advantage to France.
It was in these circumstances that the Queen reluctantly consented to a dissolution, when Mr. Disraeli and Lord Derby convinced her that they could not, after Lord Palmerston’s insolent speech, honourably go on with their Reform Bill. In fact, they pointed out that, even if they resigned, the Whigs would have to dissolve Parliament themselves in a few months to carry, against the opposition of the House of Lords, their own alternative measure of Reform, to which they were pledged. “The Congress truly does not dance,” observes the Prince Consort, in one of his shrewd letters to Stockmar. The fact is, that whenever Cavour heard of it, he warned the Emperor that if he played false, he (Cavour) would return to Turin, place his resignation in Victor Emmanuel’s hands, proceed to the United States, and not only charge the Emperor with luring the Sardinian Government into a ruinous warlike policy by promises of assistance, but that he would publish documentary proofs of his charges to the whole world. As Prince Albert said, Napoleon had “sold himself to the devil,” and “Cavour can do with his honour what he pleases.”[43] Hence, France would no longer support a proposal that Sardinia should disarm, and when Austria proposed simultaneous disarmament all round, the Emperor’s reply was, that the forces of France were not yet on a war footing. At last, Napoleon assented to this project, on condition that Sardinia and the other Italian States were heard in the Congress, which left the issue in the hands of Austria. The tension of the situation was now extreme, and telegrams came pouring in every hour to the Queen, whose nerves were sorely strained by the excitement of the crisis. Just before the dissolution, explanations of a somewhat unsatisfactory nature were given in both Houses of Parliament on the 18th of April, and next day (the 19th), Austria took the fatal and aggressive step which, as the Queen predicted, would turn public opinion against her. Instead of accepting the Congress, as France and Sardinia had accepted it, she called on Sardinia to disarm within three days, otherwise an Austrian army would march on Turin. Had Austria attacked at once she might have crushed her enemy before France could come to her aid. She hesitated and was lost. The effect of Count Buol’s ultimatum on England was electric. The Ministry, despite its pro-Austrian sympathies, hastened to protest against the invasion of Sardinia, and the Queen, in a letter to King Leopold, reflected the opinion of the people, when she said “though it was originally the wicked folly of Russia and France that brought about this fearful crisis, it is the madness and blindness of Austria that has brought on the war now.”[44] But this “madness and blindness” would not have deterred Austria from allowing the small Italian States to have a consultative representation at the Congress, had she been sure that a friendly Ministry would be in power in England. She, however, was afraid to weaken her position on the eve of Lord Palmerston’s possible return to office.[45] On the 29th Austrian troops crossed the Ticino. “All Italy is up,” writes Lord Malmesbury in his Diary: a feeble effort on his part to patch up negotiations for a Congress was rejected by France, though accepted by Austria, and the game of war began in earnest. In England, Ministers were blamed for having encouraged by their sympathy the obstinacy of Austria, which led her to break the peace. As a matter of fact, Lord Malmesbury’s efforts had been directed to pacify the combatants, to localise the war, and to prevent the German States, whose people were clamouring to be led to the conquest of Alsace, from joining in the fray.[46]
The General Election resulted in a gain of twenty-nine seats to the Tory Party, but this still left them in a minority whenever all sections of the Opposition chose to combine against them. The Liberal Party, tired of dissension, put pressure upon the two leaders by whose long rivalry it had been
TURIN.
caused, for the purpose of reconciling them, and accordingly Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell—after being urged by his brother, the Duke of Bedford—agreed that either would serve under the other. At a meeting in Willis’s Rooms, on the 5th of June, the union of all sections of the Party was consummated, and an Amendment to the Address, declaring their want of confidence in the Ministry, was drafted and agreed to. Parliament met on the 6th of June. Next night Lord Hartington in the House of Commons moved this Amendment, which, after a debate lasting over three nights, was carried on the 10th of June by a majority of thirteen in a house of 643. The Government resigned, and the Queen, who was not particularly anxious to entrust either Lord John Russell or Lord Palmerston with the Premiership, invited Lord Granville to form a Ministry. Lord Palmerston very generously consented to serve under Lord Granville, but Lord John Russell refused. He had agreed to serve under Palmerston if he were appointed to the Foreign Office, but under Lord Granville he must at least be Leader of the House of Commons. As Lord Palmerston would not accept a peerage, and as it was impossible to ask him to abandon the Leadership of the Liberal Party in the
LORD GRANVILLE.
Lower House which he had held so long, Lord Granville retired from the field. The Queen then sent for Lord Palmerston, who formed a Ministry consisting of Lord John Russell, Lord Campbell, Sir G. C. Lewis, Sir George Grey, Sir Charles Wood, the Duke of Newcastle, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Elgin, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, the Duke of Somerset, and Mr. Milner Gibson. A place—the Presidency of the Board of Trade—was offered to Mr. Cobden, which he declined. The first five represented the Whigs; the next six represented the Peelites; Messrs. Gibson and Cobden were selected to conciliate the Radicals; and there could be no doubt that, tested by individual capacity, the combination was one of the strongest ever formed. The Queen deeply regretted the exclusion of Lord Clarendon from the Cabinet, and Mr. Greville says that Lord John Russell’s selfish determination to take the Foreign Office kept Clarendon out. This is hardly just. Lord Clarendon’s pro-Austrian sympathies, and his opposition to Palmerston’s foreign policy, rendered him ineligible for office at the time. The change was attended by one unpleasant incident. The substance of the Queen’s conversations with Lord Granville found their way into the press, and her Majesty’s indignation at this betrayal of her confidence was not concealed. It was clear that some of those with whom Lord Granville had been in negotiation had not kept faith with him, and in the House of Lords (17th of June) he expressed his regret, without, however, divulging the name of the culprit who had betrayed him.
The war in the North of Italy had in the meantime been raging furiously. An uninterrupted series of defeats led Austria to the crowning disaster of Solferino (June 24th), and forced her to take refuge in the Quadrilateral. The losses of the French army had been heavy, and a weary struggle before the famous Four Fortresses was not inviting. The victory of Magenta had forced Prussia to mobilise her forces, and Solferino decided her to adopt a policy of “armed mediation”—the object of which was to concert with England and Russia terms of peace reconciling Austrian rights with Italian liberties, and forcing these terms on the combatants. In the end of May the Queen, depressed by the reverses of Austria, had been anxious that England should take her side, but had fortunately been dissuaded from pressing her views on the Government by Lord Malmesbury, who told her plainly that “the country would not go to war even in support of Italian independence, and there would not be ten men in the House of Commons who would do so on behalf of Austria.”[47] For the German States intervention was, however, hardly avoidable, and so the French Emperor prudently began to negotiate for peace.
On the 6th of July Persigny submitted to Lord John Russell a proposal that England should ask for an armistice on terms which the Emperor was willing to grant, but which the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, rejected. England also declined to sanction them because, in Lord Palmerston’s opinion, they ignored the wishes of Italy.[48] The Emperor then signed an armistice with the Austrians for seven days on the 8th of July, and arranged for a meeting with the Austrian Emperor on the 11th. On the 10th Persigny insidiously renewed his negotiations for the “moral support” of England in the new turn of affairs. Lord Malmesbury, who had the story from Persigny, says he “went to Lord Palmerston and said that the time was come for mediation, and suggested conditions, namely, Venice and its territories to be taken from Austria, not annexed to Sardinia, but made into a separate and independent State. There were other conditions, but this was the principal one.[49] That Lord Palmerston agreed to this, and rode down to Richmond to tell Lord John Russell, who was equally delighted; and that the proposal was adopted by them and sent to the Queen, who was at Aldershot, which occasioned some delay. That her Majesty refused her consent, saying the time was not yet come to make these proposals, as the fortresses were not yet taken. That, however, in the meantime, Persigny had telegraphed the consent of the English Government to his master, who immediately asked for an interview with the Emperor of Austria, showed him Persigny’s despatch, saying, ‘Here are the conditions proposed by England, and agreed to also by Prussia. Now listen to mine, which, though those of an enemy, are much more favourable. So let us settle everything together without reference to the neutral Powers, whose conditions are not nearly so advantageous to you as those I am ready to grant.’ The Emperor of Austria, not suspecting any reservation, and not knowing that the Queen had refused her consent to these proposals, which, though agreed to by her Government, were suggested by Persigny, evidently to give his master the opportunity of outbidding us, and making Francis Joseph think that he was thrown over by England and Prussia, accepted the offer, and peace was instantly concluded.”[50] There cannot be any doubt that the Queen, though unaware that Persigny was merely intending to use Palmerston as a dupe, was right in refusing her consent to these sham proposals. The Emperor of Austria, it is known, would not have accepted them. But in that case “moral support” of them, recklessly promised by Palmerston, might have laid us open to the charge of having abandoned our strict and scrupulous neutrality. By the Peace of Villafranca, which was arranged at the meeting of the Emperors, Venice was left as an Austrian State, but was to enter an Italian Confederation, presided over by the Pope; Lombardy was ceded to France, who might cede it to Sardinia, and the Dukes of Tuscany and Modena were to be restored. The verdict of the Parisian flaneurs was that “France had made a superb war, and Austria a superb peace.” Victor Emmanuel ground his teeth with rage when he found he had to accept this arrangement, adding, after his signature, the significant words, “I ratify this convention in all that concerns myself.” Cavour placed his resignation in the King’s hands, and left the camp for Turin, after a stormy interview with the French Emperor. “Arrêtez-moi, et vous serez forcé de retourner en France par le Tyrol,” he said, when Napoleon threatened to put him under arrest for his insolent language. Palmerston, in a letter to Persigny, protested against the arrangement with impotent rage.[51] The Prince Consort, however, cynically observed that the Italian Question was not quite settled yet, and that a Confederation with the Pope at the head of it was only “a bad joke.” The Queen soothed Lord Palmerston, in his bitter disappointment, by pointing out to him that his ally had now legalised in Italy that very Austrian influence which it was the object of the Palmerstonian policy to expel, but, she added, as Lord Palmerston had not protested against the war, he could not protest against the peace, unless it were considered wise to “make it appear as if to persecute Austria were a personal object with the First Minister of the Crown.” To Lord John Russell she wrote in terms that must have been as gall and bitterness to Palmerston, who had, in defiance of her objections, consented to give “moral support” to Persigny’s sham proposals for peace. The Emperor Napoleon, she observed, by his prudence and victories, had created for himself a formidable position. “It is remarkable,” she adds, “that he has acted towards Austria now just as he did towards Russia, after the fall of Sebastopol. But if it was our lot then to be left alone to act the part of the extortioner, while he acted that of the generous victor, the Queen is doubly glad that we should not now have fallen into the trap to ask from Austria, as friends and neutrals, concessions which he was ready to waive.”[52]
Still, her Majesty did not regard the anxious events of the year with unmixed regret. It was a gratifying fact that the Indian Mutiny had been suppressed, and on the 14th of April the thanks of Parliament were voted to those who had saved our Indian Empire. The Queen, in conveying her personal thanks to Lord Canning, laid before him her project for founding the Order of the Star of India. A visit from her eldest daughter had brightened her birthday festivities—saddened though these were by the illness of the Duchess of Kent, who had been attacked by erysipelas. The Government had begun to strengthen the defences of the country, and the spontaneous uprising of the people, which originated the Volunteer Movement, placed at her disposal the nucleus of a superb defensive army, to the organisation of which the Prince Consort now began to direct his attention. Mr. Gladstone’s Budget, too, though it necessitated a ninepenny income-tax[53] to meet exceptional naval and military expenditure, was passed ungrudgingly by Parliament, though, of course, it increased the popular antipathy to the French Emperor which the Peace of Villafranca had excited.
In vain did Napoleon III. endeavour to induce England to propose a Congress or a Conference for the purpose of settling the Italian Question in a manner that would allay Italian discontent. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell would have fallen into this trap also, but for the tenacity with which the Queen urged her objections to their policy. Walewski fortunately admitted to Lord Cowley that the French and Austrian Emperors had agreed not to submit the Peace they had made to a Congress. “Two emperors,” wrote the Queen to Lord John Russell (20th July), “who were at war with each other have suddenly concluded personally a peace, and we have before us merely the account of one of them through his Minister. This Minister’s account admits that his master pledged his word on certain points, but thinks it not binding if England will propose its being broken. This is a duty which honour forbids us to undertake.” The Cabinet then so far yielded to the Queen’s reasoning that they agreed to hold aloof from the whole business, till the arrangement between the two Emperors was embodied in the Treaty of Zurich. A debate in the House of Commons (8th August) showed that Parliament, on the whole, approved of this course. On the 13th came the prorogation of the Legislature, which enabled the Queen and her husband to make a short excursion to the Channel Islands.
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, WINDSOR CASTLE.
A grave conflict of opinion now arose between the Queen and Lord John Russell. Lord John, like Lord Palmerston, was desirous of re-arranging the affairs of Italy in terms of an understanding with France. In other words, he was desirous of neutralising the Treaty of Zurich by getting one of its signatories to join him in breaking those of its conditions which were favourable to the other signatory. No doubt it was difficult to persuade the Central Italian States to abide by a treaty that handed them back to the oppressors whom they had got rid of. But the problem of reconciling the people to their petty despots was one which the Queen argued should be solved, not by England, who did not create it, but by France and Austria, who did. Again, after some controversy, she succeeded in overruling fresh plans for intervention which Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell had mooted,[54] and thus matters were left when the Court reached Balmoral on the 31st of August. Hardly had the first week of her holiday passed by when the Queen discovered that Palmerston had broached his project for annexing the Italian Duchies to Sardinia in a private letter to Walewski, who, however, frankly said such a proposal would prevent Austria from signing any treaty, and thus lead to a renewal of the war. She wrote to Lord John Russell condemning Palmerston’s indiscretion, and pointing out that Walewski himself suggested that annexation of Savoy to France would be the natural compensation for annexing the Duchies to Sardinia—a compensation which would be odious to England, but which would be justified on the ground, that Palmerston’s policy rendered it necessary. But Tuscany and Romagna desired annexation to Sardinia, and Napoleon accordingly suggested that a Congress should be summoned to consider the matter. Lord Palmerston agreed to this project, and though the Queen did not oppose Palmerston, she did not conceal her opinion that the object of the Congress was to induce England to do for the Italians what Napoleon had promised but had failed to do. She, however, induced the Cabinet to warn Napoleon that England would not take on herself his self-imposed duty to his clients in the revolted States. They, in the meanwhile, calmly carried on their government in the name of the Sardinian king, and in open defiance of the compact of Villafranca.
Save for these anxious diplomatic perplexities, the Balmoral holiday was a highly enjoyable one, notable for long mountain excursions, of which the Queen’s ascent of Ben Macdhui was one of the most striking. The Prince Consort’s address to the British Association at Aberdeen was well received, and it was followed by a Highland gathering of philosophers at Balmoral, whose fête was, however, marred by tempestuous weather. On the journey south the Queen opened, on the 14th of October, the great waterworks at Loch Katrine for the supply of Glasgow—works on a scale of magnificence not unworthy of the Roman Empire. After a pleasant, but brief sojourn in Wales, the Queen and her husband reached Windsor on the 17th, pleased to find that the Prince and Princess Frederick William proposed soon to visit them. They came on the 9th of November—when the birthday of the Prince of Wales was celebrated—and stayed till the 3rd of December. The last month of the year was spent at Osborne, till Christmastide came round, when the Royal Family removed to Windsor, where, writes the Prince Consort in his Diary, “we danced in the New Year.”
CHAPTER III.
THE COURT AND THE CABINET.
The Queen’s Distrust of French Policy—Her Conferences with Lord Clarendon—The French Pamphlet on “The Pope and the Congress”—Palmerston’s Proposal of an Alliance Offensive and Defensive with France—Intriguing between Palmerston and Persigny—Recall of Cavour—Affairs in China—Mr. Cobden’s Commercial Treaty with France—Cession of Nice and Savoy to France—The Anglo-French Alliance at an End—Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill—Threatened Rupture with France—Russia Attempts to Re-open the Eastern Question—Garibaldi’s Invasion of the Two Sicilies—Collapse of the Neapolitan Monarchy—The Piedmontese Invade the Papal States—Annexation of the Sicilies to Sardinia—Meeting between Napoleon III. and the German Sovereigns at Baden—A New Holy Alliance—The Mahometan Atrocities in Syria—The Macdonald Scandal—Palmerston’s Fortification Scheme—The Lords Reject the Bill Abolishing the Paper Duty—The Volunteer Movement—Reviews in Hyde Park and Edinburgh—The Queen at Wimbledon—The Prince of Wales’s Tour in Canada and the United States—Betrothal of the Princess Alice—The Queen and her Grandchild—Serious Accident to the Prince Consort—Illness of the Queen.
Although the new year (1860) opened brightly for commercial England, the political outlook was far from cheerful. The Cabinet and the Queen were by no means in harmony on Foreign affairs, and Ministers were themselves far from being agreed as to a Reform policy. Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Milner Gibson were violently anti-Austrian. They were so eager to win credit for establishing a free kingdom in Northern Italy, that they were easy dupes in the hands of the French Emperor, whose design it was to achieve this end, so that whilst the credit should be his, the risk should be theirs. The Queen, on the other hand, was profoundly distrustful of French policy. She persisted in seeing in it nothing save a scheme for getting England to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire” for France. Her view was that the Italian people were now masters of the situation. Their old rulers could not be restored save by force, which Napoleon did not dare to use, and which Austria, weakened in her finances, and menaced by a Hungarian rising, was also afraid to apply. The solution of the Italian question in the opinion of the Queen might be safely left to the natural course of events, and the duty of England was done when she frankly expressed her sympathy with the Italian struggle for constitutional freedom. Napoleon, however, after promising to make Italy “free from the Alps to the Adriatic,” could hardly leave her to free herself as she was doing. His engagements to Austria on the other hand rendered it difficult for him to interfere actively. But it would have suited his convenience admirably if he were able to interfere with an ally, and on the basis of a proposal which originated with England, for then he might be able to offer a plausible excuse for not abiding by the pact of Villafranca. The game of diplomacy during this period was played, by France insinuating projects of interference to Lord Palmerston, so that they might seem to have originated with him, and by Lord Palmerston putting them into Lord John Russell’s mind, so that Lord John, who was at
THE QUEEN OPENING GLASGOW WATERWORKS AT LOCH KATRINE.
the Foreign Office, might seem to the Queen to be the originator of them. There is reason to believe that the Queen quite understood her Prime Minister’s tactics. Mr. Greville gives a graphic sketch of her relations to her Ministers during this period of controversy, in his record of a conversation which he had with Lord Clarendon about a confidential visit he paid to Osborne in the previous summer. “The Queen,” writes Mr. Greville, “was delighted to have him (Clarendon) with her again, and to have a good long confidential talk with him, for it seems she finds less satisfaction in her intercourse with either Palmerston or Lord John. The relations of these two are now most intimate and complete. Palmerston, taking advantage of Russell’s ignorance of Foreign Affairs, used to suggest a project to him. Russell would bring this before the Cabinet as his own, and Palmerston would support it as if the case was quite new to him.” At Osborne Clarendon “was unfortunately attacked by gout, and confined to his room. He was sitting there with Lady Clarendon, when Lady Gainsborough came in and told him that she was desired by the Queen to beg he would, if possible, move into the next room [the lady-in-waiting’s room] and establish himself there; that the Queen would come in, when all the ladies present were to go away and leave
VIEW ON LOCH KATRINE: THE WALK BY THE SHORE.
her tête-à-tête with him. All this was done, and she remained there an hour and a half talking over everything, pouring all her confidences into his ears, and asking for his advice about everything. He said he had endeavoured to do as much good as he could, by smoothing down her irritation about things she did not like. As an example, he mentioned that while the Prince was with him a box was brought in with a despatch from Lord John which the Prince was to read. He did so with strong marks of displeasure, and then read it to Clarendon, saying they could not approve of it, and must return it to Lord John. Clarendon begged him not to do this; that it was not the way to deal with him, and it would be better to see what it contained that was really good and proper, and to suggest emendations as to the rest. He persuaded the Prince to do this, advised him what to say, and in the end Lord John adopted all the suggestions they made to him. On another occasion the Queen had received a very touching letter from the Duchess of Parma, imploring her protection and good offices, which she had sent to Lord John, desiring he would write an answer for her to make to it. He sent a very short, cold answer, which the Queen would not send. She asked Clarendon to write a suitable one for her, which he did, but insisted that she should send it to Lord John as her own. She did so, Lord John approved, and so this matter was settled.”[55]
An “inspired” pamphlet on the “Pope and the Congress” had appeared in Paris, pointing to a re-arrangement of the Italian Provinces, that not only alarmed Austria, but caused her to decline to enter the Congress altogether, unless France would disavow her complicity with such schemes. The moment, therefore, was opportune for a fresh combination, and the Emperor’s new plan was one to settle the Italian Question by a triple alliance between England, France, and Sardinia, which would guarantee the latter Power against all foreign intervention in Italy. At a meeting of the Liberal Cabinet this insidious project was broached by Lord Palmerston[56] on the 3rd of January, who was willing to enter into it even at the risk of war. The compact was long an affair of mystery, but light is thrown on it by a letter from Lord Derby to Lord Malmesbury (January 15th, 1860), in which Lord Derby says, “I return the well-known handwriting enclosed in your letter of the 13th. The information there given tallies with what I have received from other quarters, among others from Madame de Flahault, whom I met at Bretby. The offer of a commercial treaty was, however, coupled, though she did not tell me so, with the proposal of an alliance, offensive and defensive, with France, and a joint guarantee of the independence of Central Italy! Cowley came here specially to urge the adoption of these two measures; but my latest intelligence is that they were debated in the Cabinet on Tuesday last, strenuously urged by Palmerston and J. Russell, who had confidently assured the Cabinet of their success, acquiesced in by Gladstone, by the double inducement of his Italo-mania and his Free Trade policy, but on discussion rejected by a majority of the Cabinet.”[57]
The enlightened obstinacy with which the Queen pressed her objections to this wild scheme caused it to be abandoned, and for the courage and tenacity with which she maintained her position at that crisis England can never be too grateful. She foresaw, what Palmerston ignored, the inevitable conflict between Prussia and France, which she hoped and believed would lead to the unification of Germany, and one almost shudders to think of the position Great Britain would have occupied in 1870, had this offensive and defensive alliance with France been consummated in 1860. Her Majesty had permitted herself to be dragged by Palmerston into a war with Russia “for an idea,” with France as an ally. She could not forget the harsh lesson which that blunder had impressed on her. She could not forget, as easily as did Palmerston, how that alliance left England with little control over her action in war, and still less control over the settlement of the peace which was forced on her by the sudden desertion of her ally. Thwarted at this point, Napoleon and Palmerston renewed the attack at another. Persigny came to Lord John Russell with a suggestion that Austria and France should both pledge themselves not to interfere in Italy unless under a European mandate in case of anarchy, and he proposed that this arrangement might be made “the basis of an agreement between France and England.” The Queen’s answer was crushing. “If,” she wrote, “France and Austria will both abstain from interfering in the affairs of Italy, it will be much the wisest course; but the Queen cannot see why this should require an agreement to be entered into between France and us, who ought not to interfere at all.”[58]
As a matter of fact, Austria formally intimated she had no intention of interfering, and French troops in Rome and Lombardy were the only foreign troops at the time on Italian territory. But the recklessness of Palmerston’s intrigues with France cannot be justly appreciated, unless it is kept in view that Napoleon was now entering into another arrangement for settling the Italian Question. At Plombières he had promised Cavour to free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic on condition that Sardinia would cede Savoy and Nice to France. This bargain Cavour repudiated when the Emperor failed to make his word good at Villafranca. On the 16th of January Victor Emmanuel recalled Cavour to the head of affairs, and a new compact was made by which Sardinia would cede Nice and Savoy, as the price of Napoleon’s consent to her annexation of the revolted Duchies. It is hardly necessary to say that had Lord Palmerston, who was in ignorance of this compact, contrived to entangle England in alliance with France, the storm of indignation which swept over England when the cession of Nice and Savoy was intimated would have brought about the fall of his Ministry. But when Parliament opened on the 24th of January, and when Mr. Disraeli, in speaking to the Address, elicited very plainly the strong feeling of the House against compromising engagements with France, Lord Palmerston was fortunate in being able to say that his Government “was totally free from any engagement whatever with any Foreign Power upon the affairs of Italy.” He did not deem it necessary to add that for this stroke of luck the Cabinet owed him no thanks.
The points in the Queen’s Speech which attracted attention after the Italian Question were the hostilities with China and the Commercial Treat with France, which Mr. Cobden had negotiated during the fall of the preceding year. The Treaty with China was to have been ratified at Pekin. But when our Ambassador attempted to proceed thither he found the Peiho river blocked, and the Chinese forts not only opened fire, but repulsed our squadron. A joint expedition was fitted out in conjunction with France to avenge this defeat, and compel the Chinese Government to ratify the Treaty at Pekin, and complaints were made that Parliament had not been consulted before the joint expedition had been decided on. The history of Mr. Cobden’s Commercial Treaty has been told at great length elsewhere,[59] so that we need do no more than say it was signed on the 29th of January. Manchester immediately hailed Napoleon III. with the same effusive admiration that it bestowed on Peel in 1846. The English press, foreseeing an era of extended trade and permanent peace, ceased its attacks on the French Emperor, and complimented him so violently, that M. Baroche told Mr. Cobden its flattery would make the Treaty unpopular in France. The Treaty was at this stage merely the skeleton of a reciprocal fiscal arrangement. England gave France coal and iron duty free. England further agreed to reduce import duties on French wines and various articles of French manufacture. France, on the other hand, engaged not only to limit her customs duty to thirty per cent. on the value of English goods, but by the 13th Article she agreed to convert ad valorem duties into specific duties by a supplementary convention. The extent to which, under this Article, duties were reduced would of course measure the usefulness of the Treaty.
The Treaty, along with the changes in taxation which it would involve, was explained by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons on the 10th of February. His Budget estimates showed a deficit of over £9,000,000, to meet which he not only continued the tea and sugar duties, but levied an Income Tax of 10d. in the pound on incomes over £150 a year, and 7d. on incomes under that amount. One part of his scheme was to abolish the Paper duty, but in this he was thwarted by the House of Lords. The French Treaty compelled him to lower the duty on French spirits and wines, and to abolish duties on manufactures not subject to excise in England. He struck 370 articles out of the Tariff list, and reduced and readjusted those that he retained, which were forty-eight. “The whole of our recent fiscal history,” according to a high authority on financial questions, “is a complete vindication of the policy of remitting and reducing duties, so that nothing should remain on the tariff which did not contribute a substantial sum to the revenue, and in order that it might do so, should bear no duty high enough to preclude its passing into general consumption. By the remissions of 1860 that ideal was nearly attained. As an example of how the remissions worked, I may mention that the imports of French wines increased at once by 127 per cent. on the reduction of the duty. On the whole of the articles on which the customs duties were repealed in 1860 the immediate increase on the import duty was 40½ per cent., although the year 1861 was in some respects a highly unfavourable one in which to judge of the purchasing capacity of the nation.”[60] This brilliant and successful policy, however, was opposed bitterly by the Tories and a few Peelites, like Sir James Graham; and some Whigs, like Lord Clarendon,
THE ROYAL EXCHANGE, MANCHESTER.
even condemned the policy of the Treaty as unsound.[61] The Queen was not sanguine about the matter, and the Prince Consort saw in the Treaty only a device for giving France the supply of coal and iron which she needed to compete with England in the markets of the world, whereas England surrendered valuable sources of revenue, without any adequate compensation. The strongest point against the Treaty was made by Lord Derby. He complained in the House of Lords that though the arrangement was based on the assumption that there would be peace between France and England, the general policy of the Cabinet, as tested by Mr. Gladstone’s estimates, assumed that war between the two nations was imminent. On a motion in the House of Commons asserting that it was not expedient to diminish sources of revenue or add a penny to the Income Tax, the whole policy of the Treaty and the Budget was challenged, and the opposition to both defeated by a majority of 116. The theoretical objections to commercial treaties generally were overcome by Mr. Gladstone’s argument that by making a small sacrifice of revenue England gained a vast extension of her export trade. But the real difficulty, of course, lay in fixing the limits of the duties under the 13th Article of the Treaty. A Commission was sent to Paris, on which Mr. Cobden agreed to serve, for the purpose of beating down the duties from the thirty per cent. maximum to a minimum of as nearly as possible ten per cent., and it was while this Commission was haggling with the French Commissioners that Cobden found himself thwarted by the secret hostility of the Foreign Office, and embarrassed by the bellicose policy of the Cabinet, which naturally produced ill feeling in France. He resented this action so bitterly, that he could not bring himself to accept from the Government the slightest reward for his services as a negotiator after he had carried out his mission with triumphant success.[62]
At the same time, it is only fair to say that the conduct of Napoleon at the time was singularly indiscreet. He made it plain that he was about to annex Nice and Savoy, although when he went to war in Italy he had protested that he did not seek for extension of territory. The Central Italian States, however, by voting through their assemblies in favour of annexation to Sardinia, furnished the French Emperor with an excuse for annexations, which were only necessary to recompense France for her expenditure of blood and treasure in the war with Austria. It was obvious that a great Italian kingdom would now be created in North Italy, and the Emperor held that he could not leave in its hands the passes by which France might be invaded. To secure his Alpine frontier, then, the Emperor insisted on taking Savoy and Nice. The provoking matter was this: the suggestion that the Central States should by a new vote in their Assemblies declare their intentions as to their future came from England. “We are asked,” wrote the Queen, in a sharp letter to Lord John Russell, “to make proposals about Italy, ‘to lay the basis for a mutual agreement with France, upon that question, and to enable the Emperor to release himself from his engagements with Austria.’ In an evil hour the proposal is made, and is now pleaded as the reason for France seizing on Savoy.... Sardinia is being aggrandised at the expense of Austria and the House of Lorraine, and France is to be compensated. If the passes of the Alps are dangerous to a neighbour, the weaker power must give them up to the stronger!”[63] The Queen, in fact, feared that on the same pretext the French Emperor might be led to demand a rectification of his Rhenish frontier, a demand which she knew must lead straight to a disastrous European war. A discussion raised by Lord Normanby in the House of Lords on the 7th of February stirred up the forces of public opinion against France. As for Cavour, he was helpless. The consent of France to the enlargement of Sardinia could not be bought save by the cession of Nice and Savoy, and so they were ceded to France, despite Cavour’s reluctance, on the 24th of March.
But the Commercial Treaty was not the only project of the Government which English mistrust of France imperilled. The Ministry was pledged to bring in a Reform Bill, and at a time when folk were brooding over the growing restlessness of France, there was little chance of carrying it. On the 1st of March Lord John Russell expounded his scheme to the House of Commons for reducing the franchise from £10 to £6, and taking twenty-five seats from small constituencies returning two members, and giving them to large constituencies deserving increased representation. The scheme fell flat in the House of Commons and in the country. It was cautiously attacked by Mr. Disraeli, who, though he declined to oppose the Second Reading, suggested that the Bill should be withdrawn. The supporters of the Ministry had no love for the measure, because if passed it involved a dissolution. The Second Reading was taken without a division, but before the stage of Committee was reached Lord John Russell withdrew the measure, and thus the question of Reform was shelved for several years to come. Lord John at last admitted that he had been mistaken in supposing that there was any widespread enthusiasm for Reform in the country. He, however, failed to see that the withdrawal of the Bill rendered Palmerston’s tenure of office a little precarious, for the party of Reform, knowing it could expect no more from him, had no strong motive for supporting him any further against the Tories.
In the meantime France was beginning to hint that Prussia should play the part of Sardinia in Germany. The consent of France, of course, could be obtained on the same terms as those which Cavour paid for it—the cession to France of territory on the Rhine. Clearly, it was argued, Napoleon would give Europe no rest till he had rectified the frontier assigned to France in 1815, after the fall of the First Empire. Very soon it became necessary to proclaim that England had no part in these schemes, and when, on the 26th of March, Lord John Russell declared in the House of Commons that there was no longer an exclusive alliance with France, the Queen congratulated him on what was really the triumph of her own policy. According to her view, a belief that this alliance existed made the European Powers at all times chary of cooperating with England. Unfortunately, Lord John Russell’s speech irritated
GENERAL GARIBALDI.
public opinion in France, and the recriminations of the Press in both countries caused Persigny to warn Palmerston that war between them would soon be inevitable. Count Flahault and Lord Palmerston held a conversation on the subject, in which they discussed the chances of war in the frankest manner—each vaunting the undeniable superiority of his country in battle.[64] Count Flahault is supposed to have been impressed with Palmerston’s demonstration that victory in such a struggle must rest on English banners, and to have succeeded in soothing down the angry feeling against England, which then raged at the French Court. The real reason why all danger of a rupture passed away was that Persigny’s favourite argument—namely, that war with England meant the
THE CURFEW TOWER, WINDSOR CASTLE.
destruction of the dynasty—prevailed. Moreover, Napoleon saw plainly that as every European Power was afraid of France, and as no European Power had anything to dread from England, Europe in a war between England and France would not be on the side of the latter Power. But no sooner did France suggest that the Treaty arrangements of 1815 might be rectified, than Russia hinted that the same process might be applied with advantage to the Treaty of 1856. The old pretext for opening up the Eastern Question—namely, the oppressiveness of the Turkish Government—lay ready to Russia’s hands. The English Cabinet, in reply to Russia’s communications on the subject, insisted that the plots of foreign intriguers in Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Servia were really at the root of the miseries of the people. Russia, in raising this question, had assumed that France would help her. But Napoleon’s eyes were fixed not on the Danube but on the Rhine; so Russian hopes of aid from France were doomed to disappointment. The next move on the European chess-board justified the anticipations which the Queen held out after Lord John Russell’s speech of the 24th of March. Finding that England no longer leaned solely on France, Austria and Prussia suggested that they should come to an understanding with England, by which they bound each other to oppose every future disturbance of frontiers in Europe—a step, however, which her Majesty shrank from taking. At her suggestion, the Cabinet agreed to a compact that each of the Powers should give the others warning of any projected disturbances of territory as soon as they were heard of, and frankly discuss their bearings; and of these disturbances one was already imminent in Southern Italy.
“Naples,” Lord Malmesbury writes in his Diary on the 17th of March, “is in a dreadful state. The tyranny of the present king far exceeds that of his father, and the exasperation is so great that a revolution may take place at any moment. But events in the north of Italy have much to say to these feelings, and naturally encourage the Neapolitans to imitate them.” In fact, Francis II. had obstinately refused to make the slightest concession to the popular party in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Heedless of the revolution in North Italy he upheld in all its baneful integrity the arbitrary system of his father, King “Bomba.” Hence in April an insurrection broke out, as Lord Malmesbury predicted, in Palermo and Messina with the avowed object of joining Sicily to the new kingdom of Northern Italy. On the 5th of May General Garibaldi, who, after the cession of his native province of Nice to France, had renounced all connection with Cavour, sailed from Genoa with 2,000 men to succour the Sicilian insurgents. “‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel!’” he said in his proclamation, “that was our battle-cry when we crossed the Ticino; it will resound to the very depths of Etna.” Landing at Marsala, he proclaimed himself Dictator in the name of the King of Sardinia, and Cæsar’s Veni, vidi, vici, might well be the record of his triumphal march to the north. On the 27th he captured Palermo, and then the Island of Sicily soon passed under his control. Every road was swarming with patriotic volunteers eager to join Garibaldi’s army, and the Royal troops, disgusted with the cowardice and incapacity of their leaders, were wavering in their allegiance to the King. They made a final stand at Melazzo, after which they took refuge in the citadel of Messina, where they remained undisturbed at the end of the year. “If we succeed,” wrote Garibaldi to Victor Emmanuel, “I shall be proud to adorn your Majesty’s crown with a new and perhaps more brilliant jewel, but always on the condition that your Majesty will resist your advisers should they wish to cede this province to the stranger, as they have ceded my native city, Nice.” The bitter allusion to Cavour’s policy, which had converted Garibaldi into a Frenchman against his will, is a sufficient answer to those who have alleged that Cavour was acting at this time in concert with Garibaldi. The most that can be said is that he knew privately that a revolutionary attack on the Sicilian monarchy was contemplated, and finding it to his account to preoccupy Francis II., then threatening interference in the revolted Roman States, he did not consider it necessary to prevent Garibaldi’s departure from Genoa.[65] But all the European Governments believed that Cavour was secretly in league with Garibaldi, and they pretended to see in the revolution of the Sicilies an attempt at piratical self-aggrandisement by Sardinia. Sardinian ambition must be curbed, said the diplomatists; and so Cavour soon found himself surrounded by embarrassments. Russia hinted at armed intervention for the protection of the Neapolitan Bourbons. France, in a paroxysm of virtue, deprecated any extension of Sardinian territory. England implored Sardinia to take no hand in, and lend no countenance to, the revolution in the Sicilies, lest France should demand more compensations in Genoa and the Island of Sardinia itself. When Lord John Russell pressed this view on the Cabinet of Turin he was probably ignorant of the fact that Cavour, when he signed the compact ceding Savoy to France, said, bitterly, “Et maintenant vous voilà nos complices!” (“Now you are an accomplice”). France had, in fact, been paid in full for her neutrality; and though Cavour issued a platonic protest against the conquest of the Sicilies in May, it was obvious that Victor Emmanuel would never risk his Crown by actively impeding in any part of Italy the movement for national independence.
The Court of Naples at this crisis seemed paralysed with panic. In August Garibaldi advanced virtually unopposed, and captured the capital, the King, with 50,000 troops, retreating to Capua and Gaëta.[66]
Italy, said Mr. Disraeli, in one of the debates in Parliament, “was in a state far beyond the management of, and settlement of Courts and Cabinets,” and whilst diplomatists were debating how she could be kept in bondage, she had freed half of her territory by one daring but decisive stroke. Flushed with his easy victory, Garibaldi now declared he would hold South Italy till the whole peninsula was free—till Austria was expelled from the north-east, and the eagles of France were chased from the pinnacles of the capital. This declaration forced the hands of France and Sardinia. Cavour and Napoleon agreed that intervention in the Papal States and in Naples could not be postponed.[67] Victor Emmanuel, therefore, summoned the Pope to dismiss the foreign levies he had organised for the purpose of forcing his revolted subjects to return to their allegiance. His Holiness refused, and then Cialdini and Fanti overran Umbria and the Marches, crushed the Papal army, and forced Lamoriciere to surrender the fortress of Ancona. Carefully avoiding a collision with Austria and with the French army of occupation in Rome—a condition attached to the neutrality of Napoleon III.—the Piedmontese troops marched on to complete the conquest of the Sicilies, where the King still held out at Gaëta and Capua. When this had been effected the kingdoms, by a popular vote, decided on annexation to Sardinia, and Europe acquiesced in the interests of law, order, and monarchical institutions. Garibaldi, on handing over the Sicilies to Victor Emmanuel, retired to Caprera, refusing all reward or recompense for his splendid services to his country, and appealing to Italy to be ready to renew the struggle for freedom in Venetia next year. But the prevailing feeling was that a final settlement of the Italian Question had not yet been arrived at, and would never be arrived at whilst Austria held Venetia and the French occupied Rome. Knowing well that the hold of Austria on Venetia was weakened by disaffection in Hungary, the Emperor of Austria promulgated a general constitution for the Empire, with separate charters for the various provinces. The scheme, however, broke down, because it failed to satisfy the popular demand for the restoration of the rights of Hungary as they existed in 1848.
POPE PIUS IX.
Early in the summer a remarkable incident in European politics happened that profoundly agitated the Queen. The French press had suggested that, provided France was compensated by an extension of frontier on the Rhine, Prussia might, with her consent, play in Germany the rôle assumed by Sardinia in Italy. When Lord John Russell publicly abandoned the French alliance, the Queen suggested the substitution for it of an arrangement between England, Prussia, and Austria, to the effect “that each should make known to the other two any overture or proposition, direct, or indirect, which either of the three may receive from France tending to any change of the existing state of territorial possessions in Europe, and that no answer should be given to such overture or proposal until the Government to which it may have been made shall have had an answer from the other two to the communication so made.” [68]
This arrangement subsisted when the French Emperor suggested to the Prince Regent of Prussia that they should meet in friendly conference together at Baden on the 16th of June. The Prince Regent of Prussia met the French Emperor, not alone, but in company with the Kings of Wurtemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover; the Grand Dukes of Baden, Saxe-Weimar, and Hesse Darmstadt; and the Dukes of Nassau and Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and the Prince of Hohenzollern. This, says the biographer of Prince Bismarck, was a “demonstration for the integrity of German soil,”[69] and it compelled the French Emperor to suddenly change his plan, which had been to suggest that Prussia should seize Savoy and Hanover, and let France rectify her frontier on the Rhine. This design could not be avowed at such a meeting, so Napoleon contented himself with assuring the Prince Regent of Prussia that he had no intention of dissevering any territory from Germany—and giving for the first time his reasons for violating the pledges of Milan and annexing Nice and Savoy. The Prince accepted Napoleon’s assurances, saying that he could immediately restore confidence to Germany by communicating them to the German sovereigns then in Baden. He also transmitted to the Prince Consort a private account of the interview, which quite relieved the anxiety which the conference had caused the Queen.[70]
Following closely on this conference came a letter from the French Emperor to Persigny for Palmerston’s perusal, in which he strove hard to reconstruct his English alliance, but to which no other reply was given than that England gave France credit for good intentions, and would remain her friend so long as she did not disturb the peace of Europe.[71] Garibaldi’s invasion of the Sicilies had alarmed Austria. French conspirators, it was said, were already busy in Hungary and Russian Poland, and Venetia might be attacked at any moment. In these circumstances the attitude of Prussia was a matter of supreme concern to Austria. The unrest of Poland rendered it inconvenient for Russia to help Austria. Could she hope to induce Prussia to assist her in coercing her mutinous subjects? The meeting of the Emperor of Austria and the Prince Regent of Prussia at Töplitz was watched with intense interest by the Queen, who knew how fatal it would be for Germany if Prussia suffered herself to be entangled in the non-German affairs of Austria. The Austrian Emperor, however, did not ask for Prussian aid in the event of Venetia being attacked by France or Italy, unless, as he hoped, Prussia “after negotiations,” saw in such an attack a common danger. The real danger to Prussia was that Austria, after getting a promise of assistance, might provoke France to attack Italy; but as a matter of fact, the Prince Regent kept clear of all engagements with Austria at this interview, about which so much mystery was raised at the time. According to the private account of it given by the Prince of Prussia to the Prince Consort, it only led to an exchange of ideas, and to certain vague promises on the part of the Emperor Francis Joseph, that he would grant reforms to his provinces.[72] After the fall of the Neapolitan dynasty had been brought about, the French Emperor let it be known that whilst he approved of the creation of a strong Italian kingdom, he would not defend Italy if she attacked Austria. It was, indeed, the knowledge of this fact which enabled Cavour to hold the Italian Revolution in hand, for even Garibaldi was not so reckless as to rush into war against Austria without allies. Still, the Austrians put little faith in Napoleon’s assurances, and on the 25th of October a meeting between the rulers of Austria, Russia, and Prussia was held at Warsaw to discuss the situation.
The rumour which immediately flew round was that the Holy Alliance was to be revived, that the three Powers were to combine for the revision of the Treaty of 1856, and, having isolated England, to coerce all struggling nationalities, and defend Austria in Venetia and Hungary. This rumour was quite unfounded. The Powers did agree, however, that if Austria, attacked in Venetia, proved victorious and re-conquered Lombardy, she could not be asked beforehand to give back Lombardy to Italy, though the fate of that province might properly be determined by a Peace Congress. The Prince Regent of Prussia insisted that England must be kept informed of all their transactions in such a Congress. But at this meeting there was a decided tendency to isolate England because of Lord John Russell’s despatch of the 27th of October, and the Russian Czar pressed forward Prince Gortschakoff’s idea, which was that by conciliating France, a quadruple alliance might be formed against the progress of revolution, which Lord John Russell was supposed to have stimulated. The objection of the Prince Regent of Prussia—who, like the Austrian Emperor, thought that France ought to give new guarantees against raising revolutionary disturbances in Europe—to act save in concert with England, was, however, fatal to Prince Gortschakoff’s schemes. Prussia, in fact, held obstinately to the opinion that the friendship of England was of vital importance to the defence of Germany against French encroachments. These facts are worth noting, for they explain the just indignation of the Queen against a series of attacks on Prussia which at this inopportune moment began to appear in the Times. They preyed on the mind of the Prince Consort to such an extent that the Queen asserts his health gave way, which but served to add to her sorrows and anxieties.
Yet it is but just to say that the Times was not entirely to blame. The conduct of the Prussian Government in a matter of painful dispute between the administrations of the two countries was far from satisfactory. In September a certain Captain Macdonald quarrelled with the railway authorities at Bonn about a seat in a railway carriage. He was violently dragged from his place and cast into prison with arbitrary brutality. The Public Prosecutor, in dealing with his case, had publicly accused English residents and travellers in Germany of being notorious for “rudeness, impudence, and boorish arrogance;” and as the Queen and her husband were, a few days after that speech was delivered, themselves tourists in Germany, the Public Prosecutor’s insolence was felt to be peculiarly obnoxious. The Queen herself, in an entry in her Journal made during her German tour, says, “Saw Lord John on the subject of a vexatious circumstance which took place about three weeks ago—namely, a dispute on the railway at Bonn, and the ejection and imprisonment (unfairly, it seems) of a Captain Macdonald, and the subsequent offensive behaviour of the authorities. It has led to ill blood and much correspondence; but Lord John is very reasonable about it, and not inclined to do anything rash. These foreign Governments are very arbitrary and violent, and people are apt to give offence and to pay no regard to the laws of the country.”[73] Baron Schlenitz, says the Prince Consort in a letter to Stockmar, “took it [the dispute] very lightly;” whereas, on the other hand, Lord Palmerston demanded that the judge who sentenced Captain Macdonald to imprisonment should be dismissed, and reparation made to the Captain, otherwise diplomatic relations would be broken off with Prussia. But the Prussian Government kept this irritating business open for several
VOLUNTEER REVIEW IN THE QUEEN’S PARK, EDINBURGH.
(From the Print published by Messrs. McFarlane and Erskine, Edinburgh.)
months; in fact, they did not settle the affair till May, 1861, and thus the English Press could not be altogether blamed if its criticisms of Prussian diplomacy were somewhat caustic.
Springing from the unrest of Europe we find in 1860 a great popular movement in England in favour of national defence. This found expression in two forms—in Palmerston’s Fortification Scheme and the rapid increase of the Volunteer Force. Both schemes were watched by the Queen with the closest attention, and both were furthered by her to the utmost of her power, though one of them very nearly shattered the Ministry. In an article on the History of 1852-60, Mr. Gladstone comments on the silent conflict that went on during 1860 between the policy that found expression in the Commercial Treaty with France, and that which was typified by the Fortification Scheme of Lord Palmerston.[74] The annexation of Nice and Savoy alarmed the country, and convinced even Lord Palmerston that the French Emperor had a fixed idea that it was his mission to rectify the frontier assigned to France in 1815. This might lead him to cast a hungry eye on Belgium, where already French intriguers were busy. As Mr. Tennyson sang, in the poem the publication of which in the Times of the previous year evoked the Volunteer Force, the word went round:—
“Form! be ready to do or die!
Form! in Freedom’s name and the Queen’s!
True, that we have a faithful ally,
But only the Devil knows what he means.”
France was increasing her army and her navy. The Report of a Royal Commission on National Defences had early in the year recommended the construction of fortifications to protect our arsenals and places of arms. The Cabinet resolved to spend £9,000,000 in carrying out these works, the money to be raised by a loan to be repaid in twenty years.
The vast fiscal changes involved by the Treaty were based on the supposition that France would be at peace with us. Yet the Fortification Scheme clearly rested on the assumption that France would soon involve us in war. In defence of this contradictory policy Mr. Gladstone writes, “like the builders of the Second Temple, grasping their tool with one hand and the sword with the other, we with one hand established commercial relations with France of unexampled amity and closeness, while with the other we built ships, constructed fortifications, and founded volunteers with a silent but well-understood and exclusive view to an apprehended invasion from France.”[75] He goes on to say that the augmentation of our forces in 1860 had the advantage “of strengthening the position of England in the councils of Europe with respect to the reconstitution of Italy.” But, at the time, he was by no means favourably disposed to this military expenditure. Lord Palmerston told the Queen that Mr. Gladstone was threatening to resign if it were sanctioned; adding that, however much that was to be regretted, “it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth or Plymouth.” He was not satisfied in fact that the danger was so great as Palmerston and the Party of Panic imagined. He did not like the mode of raising the money which was proposed. “The struggle in the forum of his conscience,” writes Mr. Morley, “was long and severe;”[76] but finally he decided he could do more for the taxpayers’ interest by remaining in the Cabinet and influencing it than by resigning office; and trivial concessions were made to him which allayed his scruples. The Prince Consort, writing on the 31st of July to Baron Stockmar, says, “Gladstone continues in the Ministry, but on the condition that he shall be free next year to attack and denounce the fortifications, to the construction of which he this year gives his assent and the money. Palmerston laughingly yielded this condition to him.” Accordingly, on the 23rd of July, a resolution was carried in the House of Commons authorising £2,000,000 to be raised on annuities terminable in thirty years—this sum being enough to cover the expenditure possible within the year. Lord Palmerston, in speaking to the resolution, attacked France with great spirit, though it is unlikely that if France had really evil designs at the time on England, she would have given the Government even a year’s grace in which to begin their costly coast-fortification. One reason why Mr. Gladstone was hostile to a Fortification Scheme was that it upset all his financial arrangements. It created a feeling against sacrificing revenue, of which so much had already been surrendered to carry out the French Treaty.
It was soon evident that the proposal to abolish the Paper Duty was unpopular in Parliament, and when it passed the third reading by a majority of nine only, Lord Palmerston warned the Queen, who was on the side of the minority on this occasion, that the House of Lords would probably reject it. The Cabinet was not united on the subject, for Lord Malmesbury states that he was deputed to tell Lady Palmerston that the Opposition meant to reject it, “for which she thanked us.” Nay, he was deputed to go further, and promise her their support in the event of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Milner Gibson and Lord John Russell resigning either over the failure of the Paper Duty scheme, or over the withdrawal of the Reform Bill. When both events became inevitable, the Cabinet was severely shaken, and all through the early days of June it was expected that it would be broken up. When the Lords rejected the Paper Duty Bill, Mr. Gladstone threatened to resign unless the Government and the House of Commons censured them for meddling with a Bill relating to taxation. The Peers, however, though they have not the right to initiate Bills dealing with taxation, have always claimed the right of rejecting them, and the Commons’ Privilege Committee in their Report of the 29th of June admitted this right. However, to pacify Mr. Gladstone and the Radicals, Lord Palmerston introduced a series of Resolutions on the 6th of July in a speech which Lord Derby said was “the best tight-rope dancing he ever saw.”[77] These Resolutions affirmed once more the exclusive right of the House of Commons to impose and remit taxes, and to frame Bills of Supply, but did not challenge the claim of the Peers to reject them—and they were carried by a vote of 177 to 138.
THE VOLUNTEER CAMP, WIMBLEDON.
The feeling of mistrust against France had given a strong impetus to the Volunteer movement in the country, and in 1860 this found vent in the great review of the citizen army in Hyde Park, and the formation of the National Rifle Association at Wimbledon. The review was held on the 23rd of June, and 20,000 men from all parts of the country attended. The Queen appeared on the ground at four o’clock in the afternoon with the King of the Belgians, the Princess Alice, and Prince Arthur, the Prince Consort riding beside her carriage. In two hours it was over—belying the Duke of Wellington’s historic doubt whether we had a general who could get so many men into Hyde Park and out again without “clubbing” and confusion. Lord Malmesbury says, “I went to Mr. Disraeli’s house in Grosvenor Gate to see the sight, which was very fine. The enthusiasm of the men and spectators exceeded all description. There were 20,000 Volunteers, all young men between eighteen and thirty.
THE QUEEN AT WIMBLEDON.
They went through their evolutions with the greatest steadiness and precision, and at the final advance in line, when they halted within a short distance of the Queen, and the bands had ceased playing ‘God Save the Queen,’ they raised a cheer that might be heard for miles. This was taken up by the spectators, and the scene was so exciting that the Queen was quite overcome, and I saw many people the same.”[78] On the 7th of July her Majesty opened the first meeting of the National Rifle Association on Wimbledon Common, under the first sunny summer sky of a peculiarly bleak season. Mr. Whitworth[79] had adjusted one of his rifles so neatly that when her Majesty pulled the trigger and fired the first shot at 400 yards she scored a bull’s-eye.[80] Her own prize, conferring the Champion Marksmanship of England on the winner, was carried off by Mr. Edward Boss, of the 7th North York Rifles, with a score of twenty-four points—the greatest possible score being sixty. The public interest in the meeting, which was, in a sense, a great volunteer picnic, was indicated by the fact that the admission money (1s. a head) taken in six days from visitors amounted to £2,000.
Later in the season (7th of August) a grand review of the Scottish Volunteers was held in the Queen’s Park, Edinburgh, where the smooth plain on which Holyrood stands picturesquely surrounded by hills and crags, forms a natural amphitheatre admirably adapted for the popular enjoyment of a military pageant. All Scotland, so to speak, swarmed into Edinburgh, to be present at the scene, and contingents even from the Orkneys and Shetlands and the “storm-tossed Hebrides” were represented in the ranks of the great citizen army of the northern kingdom. It was said at the time that Scotland—always a military nation—must have a mania for volunteering, because she sent more troops to the review than passed the Queen at Hyde Park. The Queen herself remarked this fact, and her suite, who had seen the display in Hyde Park, were struck with the superior physique and drill of the men, though somewhat surprised that the Highland costume was worn by so few even of the Highland Regiments. The Queen was accompanied by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, then living at Cramond, near Edinburgh, the Prince Consort, the Princess Alice, and Prince Arthur. The Prince Consort rode on the right of her carriage, and the Duke of Buccleuch, as Captain of the Royal Body-Guard of Scottish Archers—a corps consisting entirely of nobles and gentlemen, who have the exclusive right of watching over the Royal person north of the Tweed—rode on the left hand. The programme was the same as at Hyde Park, but the surroundings and the enthusiasm of the troops and the myriads of spectators who covered the hillsides, made the spectacle more impressive. “It was magnificent,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold; “finer decidedly than in London.”
Many interesting family events rendered the year 1860 memorable to the Queen. Of these, one of the most important was the tour of the Prince of Wales in Canada—a visit which had been promised during the Crimean War, in answer to a deputation which had invited the Queen to go to the Colony,[81] and, without avail, begged her to appoint one of her sons Governor-General.[82] In spring it was decided that the Prince should proceed to the Far West under the care of the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and when the news reached America, Mr. Buchanan, President of the United States, invited the Prince to visit the Republic, promising him such a warm welcome as would be most pleasing to the Queen. The invitation was accepted, but it was intimated that on his tour the Prince would drop all Royal state and travel under one of his Scottish titles—Baron Renfrew. On the 2nd of August his Royal Highness received a hearty greeting from the people of St. John’s, Newfoundland, the rough fishermen and their wives being especially enthusiastic in their loyalty. On the 7th, at Halifax, he was pelted with flowers by cheering crowds till, the Duke of Newcastle said, their carriage was rapidly filled up with bouquets; in fact, all through Canada the welcome given to the Queen’s son for the Queen’s sake was cordial in the extreme. One of the most picturesque incidents of the tour was the visit to Niagara by night, the Falls being illuminated by Bengal lights. These were first of all placed between the Falls and the rock over which they tumble, and turned as if by magic the vast sheet of water into a mass of incandescent silver, the boiling river itself gleaming with phosphorescent tints, and the spray rising high in the air as a thick luminous cloud. Then when the white lights were changed to crimson, the Falls and rapids were transformed into a seething lurid river of blood, and the spectators were awed into silence by the terrific grandeur of the scene. When the Prince crossed to the United States the people there strove to outdo the Canadian welcome. It was laughingly said that he would be lucky if he got out of the country without being asked to “run for President” next year, and the accounts which the Queen received of the splendid reception at Chicago deeply moved her. At Cincinnati and St. Louis the crowds were still greater and more enthusiastic, though quieter and more staid in demeanour than those in Canada. On the 3rd of October the Prince visited President Buchanan at Washington, and in company with him stood uncovered before the tomb of Washington—who had wrested the independence of the continent from his great-grandfather. In New York no monarch of ancient or modern times could have received a warmer ovation from his own people, and the reception at Boston, if less effusive, was not less cordial. The Duke of Newcastle, in reporting on the results of the tour, attributed its success first, to the growing feeling of goodwill that was springing up between Americans and Englishmen—a feeling, alas! to be soon rudely disturbed by the ungenerous support which the aristocratic classes gave to the secession of the Southern Slave States, and secondly, added the Duke, to the “very remarkable love for your Majesty personally, which pervaded all classes in this country, and which has acted like a spell upon them when they found your Majesty’s son actually among them.” The Prince of Wales, in fact, embodied for the American people the romance of their ancestral past—and their hearts warmed to him from the moment he set foot on their territory. The President also wrote to the Queen, telling her how the Prince had passed through the ordeal of the
PRESIDENT BUCHANAN.
visit—always dignified, always frank, always affable, so that he “conciliated, wherever he has been, the kindness and respect of a sensitive and discriminating people.”[83] The Queen in her reply said that her son could not sufficiently extol the great cordiality with which he had been received, and she went on to say, “Whilst as a mother I am most grateful for the kindness shown him, I feel impelled to express, at the same time, how deeply I have been touched by the many demonstrations of affection towards myself personally which his presence has called forth.”[84] The Duke of Newcastle had taken grave responsibilities on him in connection with the visit, and, as Dr. Acland told Mr. Charles Sumner, it was therefore for him a personal triumph. The Queen was evidently of the same opinion, because, on his return, she testified her appreciation of the tact with which the Duke had managed the tour by conferring on him the Order of the Garter. A similar visit paid by Prince Alfred to Cape Town evoked similar expressions of goodwill from the colonists. Writing to Stockmar the Prince Consort speaks of the curious coincidence which, in almost the same week, caused one brother to open the great bridge across the St. Lawrence, and the other to lay the foundation stone of the breakwater in Cape Town harbour at the other end of the world. “What a cheering picture,” he writes, “is here of the progress and expansion of the British race, and of the useful co-operation of the Royal Family in the civilisation which England has developed and advanced.”[85]
FROGMORE HOUSE.
(From a Photograph by J. Valentine and Sons, Dundee.)
Early in May the Royal Family were visited by Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, between whom and the Princess Alice “a natural liking” had grown up, which was destined to ripen into a warmer feeling. “The Queen and myself,” observes the Prince Consort in a letter to Baron Stockmar, “look on as passive spectators, which is undoubtedly our best course as matters at present stand.” It was, however, an open secret that they favoured the alliance. In the following November, Prince Louis came to Windsor as a formal suitor for the hand of the Princess. In her “Leaves from a Journal” the Queen herself tells the story of the wooing on the 30th of November. “After dinner,” she says, “while talking to the gentlemen, I perceived Alice and Louis talking before the fireplace more earnestly than usual, and when I passed to go to the other room, both came up to me, and Alice in much agitation said he had proposed to her, and he begged for my blessing. I could only squeeze his hand and say ‘Certainly,’ and that we would see him in our room later.... Alice came to our room—agitated but quiet.... Albert sent for Louis to his room—went first to him, and then called Alice and me in.... Louis has a warm, noble heart. After talking a little we parted, a most touching, and, to me, sacred moment.”
The autumnal sojourn at Balmoral was shortened by the Queen’s decision to visit Germany, where she had now a little grand-daughter added to the Royal circle. On the 22nd of September the Queen, Prince Consort, and Princess Alice left Buckingham Palace for Gravesend, Lord John Russell being Minister in attendance. The flat scenery of the Scheldt, which was speedily reached, struck her Majesty as being in ugly contrast to the romantic grandeur of the Aberdeenshire mountains. At Verviers the tour was saddened by the news of the death of the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, the Prince Consort’s stepmother. At Aix-la-Chapelle the Prince’s valued friend, the Prince Regent of Prussia, and his brother, Prince Frederick Charles, met them; and at Frankfort they were joined by the Princess of Prussia and Prince Frederick William. As they neared Coburg the Queen says she felt quite agitated when her husband began to identify each scene and spot with his life in his old home, now darkly shadowed by mourning. The Princess Frederick William was here, however, and brought “the darling little grandchild” for the Queen’s inspection—“such a darling little love,” writes her Majesty—“a fine, fat child, with a beautiful white, soft skin, very fine shoulders and limbs, and a very dear face, like Vicky and Fritz, and also Louise of Baden. He has Fritz’s eyes and Vicky’s mouth, and very fair, curly hair.” A meeting with Stockmar, then old and feeble, but fresh in heart and spirits, also enhanced the enjoyment of the visit. After a fortnight’s residence, the Queen writes, “Our English people are enchanted with everything, with the beauty of the country, and of the palaces, the quiet simplicity of the people, &c.” On the 1st of October the Prince Consort narrowly escaped being killed. The horses of his carriage ran away with him, and to save his life he had to jump out when he saw that a collision with a barrier across the road was inevitable. He was bruised badly, though not seriously injured. The Queen however, was much alarmed. “Oh! God,” she writes, “what did I not feel! I could only, and do only, allow the feelings of gratitude, not those of horror, at what might have happened, to fill my mind;” and in testimony of her
THE QUEEN AND HER LITTLE GRANDSON, PRINCE WILHELM OF PRUSSIA.
gratitude she established a foundation, called the “Victoria-Stift,” in Coburg. The “Victoria-Stift” consisted of the investment of 12,000 florins (£1,000) in the names of the Burgomaster and chief clergyman of Coburg. Every year, on the 1st of October—the anniversary of the Prince’s escape—the interest from this sum is divided among certain young men and women to help them in their occupations and assist them to earn a livelihood. Old family friends and all picturesque places in the neighbourhood were visited; and the Queen’s grandchild, the little Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, seems to have been a source of never-failing delight to her Majesty. But on the 9th of October the enjoyment of these quiet days came to an end, and the Queen and her husband left a spot endeared to them by many sweet remembrances. This fortnight, writes the Queen, “with its joys and sorrows, and the fearful episode of my dearest Albert’s accident, will be for ever deeply engraven on my heart.” On the return journey they were joined by the Prince Regent of Prussia, who travelled with them to Mayence. Rain spoiled the beauties of the Rhine; but when Coblentz was reached the Princess of Prussia was waiting to solace the Royal Party, who arrived, wet, chilled, and uncomfortable. The Queen, in fact, had caught a cold, and illness and depression of spirits due to the parting from her daughter and her beloved grandchild, Prince Wilhelm, robbed the rest of her holiday of all enjoyment. When she reached Brussels she could hardly walk, and had to keep to her room and comfort herself with the “Mill on the Floss” for a day, whilst Dr. Bayly was treating her for a feverish sore throat. After a dismally rainy voyage the Royal travellers reached Windsor on the 17th of October. “Already a week since we left Coburg,” writes the Queen, “and the dear happy days there belong to the treasured recollections of the past!”[86]
Politically, though the year had been eventful, it was not without its compensations. The dying embers of the Indian Mutiny had been extinguished. The war with China had ended with the capture of Pekin, the destruction of the Summer Palace, and the ratification of the Convention of Tchung-Kow and the Treaty of Tien-tsin[87] (24th of October). “At home with ourselves and with our colonies,” Prince Albert says in a letter to Stockmar (28th December), “we have every reason to be satisfied.” One event, indeed, brought grief to the Queen and her family. This was the death of the venerable Earl of Aberdeen, on the 14th of December. Lord Aberdeen was not only the trusted Minister, but the valued personal friend of the Queen and her husband. His experience of public affairs extended from the close of the war with Napoleon to the beginning of the war with Russia, and no English Minister in modern times enjoyed in a higher degree the respect and confidence of foreign Governments and Sovereigns. His stainless integrity and scrupulous honesty won the confidence of the Prince Consort. The high moral courage which led him to speak the truth in public, however unpalatable and unpopular it might be, so endeared him to the Queen that she expressed her admiration for it on the only occasion when she rebuked him for an impolitic indulgence in this virtue. Though a Peelite, he differed from his leader in having greater foresight, and a firmer grip of principle. Aberdeen did not, like Peel, work aimlessly from sheer expediency. He had a theory, a guiding idea, which, rightly or wrongly, always pushed him far in advance of his Party. This theory was that the less people were meddled with by governments, the happier and more prosperous would they become. He carried his principle of non-intervention from foreign to home policy, and acted on the conviction that more good was to be done by repealing old laws, than by enacting new ones. For the salvation of the people, he trusted to independence rather than patronage—to liberty rather than protection. He was blamed for buttressing the petty despotisms of the Continent, but he was blamed unjustly. He shrank from shedding English blood, and wasting English treasure in helping revolutionary movements, and he did so for two reasons. Nations worthy of freedom, he thought, must free themselves; the patronage of revolutionary movements must sooner or later involve England in war with all the Great Powers of Europe. His failure to avert the Crimean War need not here be dwelt on. It was the great blot on his career. Yet it is but due to his memory to say, as even Mr. Disraeli admitted, that if Lord Aberdeen had been head of a Cabinet the members of which all shared his views, and were all loyal in supporting his policy, the Crimean War would probably never have broken out. If Aberdeen had been master in his Cabinet, if he had been served at Constantinople by a loyal Ambassador, and at St. Petersburg by an Envoy who could have opposed with his own tact, patience, and cool common sense the monomaniacal ideas and arguments of the Czar, the conflict between Russia and England could have been averted.[88]
THE QUEEN’S PRIVATE SITTING-ROOM, OSBORNE.
(From a Photograph by Hughes and Mullins, Ryde.)
CHAPTER IV.
THE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.
England in 1861—The Jumble of Parties—Secret Alliance Between Palmerston and the Tories—Opening of Parliament—The Prince Consort and the “Two Old Italian Masters”—Lady William Russell’s Salon—The Proposed Sale of Venice—The Fall of Gaeta—Prussia and Italy—Death of Cavour—A casus belli Against France—Napoleon in the East—Denmark and the Duchies—The Queen’s Private Sorrows—Last Illness and Death of the Duchess of Kent—Renewed Attacks in the Press on Prince Albert—Palmerston Accused of Tampering with Despatches—Anecdote of Lord Derby and Lord Granville—The Budget—Repeal of the Paper Duty—Palmerston’s “Grudge” Against Prince Albert—The Marriage of the Princess Alice announced—The Queen and Her Social Duties—Two Drawing-Rooms and Two Investitures—A Season of Mourning—Death of Lord Herbert of Lea—Lord John Russell’s Peerage—Reform and the Working Classes—Ministerial Changes—The Queen’s Tour in Ireland—The Queen and German Unity—Coronation of the King of Prussia—Death of the King of Portugal—Fatigue of the Prince Consort—Signs of His Last Illness—The Queen at Her Husband’s Sick Bed—A Mournful Vigil—The Prince Consort’s Last Words—Scene at the Death-Bed—The Sorrow of the Country—The Queen’s Despair—Her Removal from Windsor—Prince Albert’s Character and Career—His Funeral—The Scene at the Grave—The Queen and the Princess Alice.
From her own tranquil island the Queen, at the beginning of 1861, looked abroad upon a world that was strangely disturbed. It was a world in which men cried peace when there was no peace. In Europe, French agents were intriguing with the revolutionary parties in Poland, Hungary, and the Danubian Principalities. Italian conspirators were busy as usual in Venetia. The misgovernment of Turkey was again goading her Christian subjects to despair, and rousing the wrath of Panslavic fanaticism in Russia. Across the Atlantic the New Year brought with it the severance of South Carolina from the United States, and the pulse of the British aristocracy and their social parasites rose high as their golden youth congratulated each other on the “bursting of the bubble Republic.”[89] It is true that the harvest had been bad, and that the winter had been the coldest that had been experienced for half a century. But Free Trade made food cheap and wages high, so that there was no popular discontent to trouble the Government. The prospect of a cotton famine in Lancashire, as the result of a civil war in America, was not thought to be within the range of practical contingencies. As for political parties, they were, as Mr. Ashley says, “in a singular jumble at the period which we have now reached.”[90] The Tories were alarmed by Mr. Gladstone’s Budgets. These were supposed to be dangerously democratic, not only because his attack on the Paper Duty seemed designed to strengthen the power and position of a cheap press, but because in his financial speeches he seemed to justify the repeal of taxes solely by his desire to benefit the poor, and his imposition of new burdens by his desire to punish the rich for being wealthy. Absurd as this suspicion was, it is necessary to take it seriously, because it had much to do with creating the unexpected dictatorship of Lord Palmerston.
It was well known that Palmerston’s hostility to reform had well-nigh driven the Radicals into factious opposition. They had no more to expect from him, and at any moment they were ready to act against him. They even offered to combine with the Tories, turn out the Government, and keep Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli in power for two years, during which period they thought the Reform problem would ripen for solution. This offer was not accepted. In fact, through Lord Malmesbury and Lady Palmerston, a secret alliance was organised, in terms of which the Tories agreed to maintain Lord Palmerston in office “if only he would resist ‘Democratic’ Budgets, and keep his hands from any violent action against Austria.”[91] This compact was ratified by the people, who, despite the triumph of the Anglo-French alliance in China, were growing every day more distrustful of Napoleon’s warlike preparations, which it was part of Palmerston’s policy to counteract. Mr. Ashley asserts that Lord Palmerston was “too loyal to enter into any such secret understanding.” As a matter of fact, the alliance was, on behalf of Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, first tendered by Lord Malmesbury at Lady Palmerston’s party, on the 12th of May, 1860, when, says Lord Malmesbury, “Lady Palmerston expressed herself as being very grateful for the offer.” [92]
Count Vitzthum, however, puts the matter beyond doubt. Writing in 1861, he says:—“The secret agreement between the Conservatives and Palmerston, which had checked the barren Party contest of the previous year, was renewed before the Session began, and even received the secret sanction of the Court. After Lord Palmerston, in January, had submitted to the Queen and Prince Albert his programme for the current year, and had promised in particular his vigorous prosecution of the works for national defence, Disraeli was invited to Windsor. The Prince, to his no small satisfaction, received the assurance from the leader of the Opposition that the Tories, though three hundred strong, had no thoughts of undertaking the Government, so long as Palmerston continued to safeguard the Conservative interests of the State. Disraeli added that it rested only with the present Prime Minister to exercise a power such as none of his predecessors had wielded since Pitt.”[93] Finally, conclusive proof of the existence of the alliance is given by the highest living authority on such a matter—namely, Sir Theodore Martin—who discloses details of the whole transaction. Sixty members of the House of Commons had apparently pledged themselves to follow Mr. Cobden’s policy of “democratic finance,” which was to lessen expenditure by reducing armaments. Palmerston’s Government was therefore doomed unless an alliance could be struck up with the Tories. According to the Prince Consort, Mr. Disraeli said that “the Conservative party was ready not only to give general support to a steady and patriotic policy, but even to help the Minister out of scrapes if he got into any.” But, in return, they must, to use Sir Theodore Martin’s words, “state explicitly the principles of their policy, and not enter into a line of what he (Mr. Disraeli) termed democratic finance.”[94] When Mr. Ashley stated that Lord Palmerston was “too loyal to enter into any such secret understanding,” he must have neglected to read the letter dated 24th of January, 1861, which the Prince Consort sent to Lord Palmerston, embodying the terms of the understanding in question. It is also possible that he did not anticipate the publication of Lord Malmesbury’s diary, in which, under date the 14th of March, 1861, there is the following entry:—“The House of Commons threw out Mr. Locke-King’s Bill for reducing the county franchise to £10, by a majority of 28. We had agreed with the Government that, if they helped us to throw out this Bill, we would help them to pass Lord Palmerston’s Resolution, reversing their former vote on the payment of the Navy.”[95]
On the 4th of February the Queen came to town for the opening of Parliament, which took place on the 5th. The Royal Speech, says Count Vitzthum, “ratified the private agreement (between Palmerston and the Tories) by making no mention of reform. The skirmishes that took place during the
ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL, WINDSOR, FROM THE RIVER.
Session had therefore no practical importance, and only served to conceal from the public and the parties themselves the understanding already effected between the leaders.”[96] Very few points for debate were raised by the Queen’s Speech. Peace in Europe, it was suggested, could be preserved by the moderation of the Powers. Syria would soon be pacified, and thankfulness was expressed at the success of British arms in China. A sympathetic allusion to the Civil War in America, was prettily pointed by a reference to the kindly welcome which the Prince of Wales had received in the United States, and the loyalty of the Canadians was frankly recognised. Crime, bankruptcy, land transfer, and rating were the subjects suggested for legislation. The debate on the Address in both Houses was insincere. Lord Derby made fun of the Government for coquetting with revolution in Italy, and he ridiculed Lord John Russell’s inconsistent despatches to Sir James Hudson. “Mr. Disraeli,” writes Count Vitzthum, “handled the same theme in an academic fashion in the House of Commons,” but nobody dreamt of seriously assaulting the Ministerial position. “In Italy strange things are taking place. It is still the idol of the two ‘old Italian masters,’” wrote the Prince Consort to Stockmar on the eve of the opening of Parliament.[97] And yet, when Ministers heard that Cavour had allowed arms to be shipped from the arsenal at Genoa for the conspirators who were organising an insurrection in Turkey, they became a little uneasy. No harm, however, came of this, because the Turkish authorities at Constantinople being forewarned, seized the arms when they arrived. But the problem of problems was, what did Napoleon mean to do in Italy? He had opened the French Chambers with a speech which, describing the annexation of Savoy as an act done in maintenance of the natural rights of France, created a panic among the Palmerstonians and their Tory allies. If Savoy—why not Belgium? was the question which this doctrine of natural rights suggested to men’s minds. And yet at this time Napoleon’s power was vastly exaggerated. The priests, who had not forgiven him for enriching Italy at the expense of the Pope, condemned his policy from their pulpits. The vulgar luxury and swindling speculations in which the Imperial entourage indulged, disgusted the educated classes. It was at this time that those who had hailed the Emperor as the “saviour of Society” began to call him “Badinguet”—after the bricklayer whose disguise he had borrowed when escaping from Ham. At one time Palmerston and Russell imagined they had discovered the solution of the most pressing of the Italian problems. They thought—or rather the Emperor of the French persuaded them to think—that Austria might sell Venetia to Sardinia, and whilst retaining half the purchase price to relieve her strained finances, with the other half buy Bosnia and the Herzegovina from the Sultan, who was also in lack of money. The Queen thwarted this cunning scheme, when Lord John Russell broached it in the end of December, by pointing out that to suggest the sale of Venetia to Sardinia, was to record an official opinion that Venetia ought to be in some way freed from Austrian rule. In the event of Austria refusing to sell the province this would be used as a justification for wresting Venetia from her, or for compelling England to press her to give it up. Palmerston himself came round to this view, and so the Venetian question was for a time eliminated. But in Italy it soon became clear that France meant to give Victor Emmanuel freedom to act. Gaeta surrendered in February when the French fleet was withdrawn—the King and Queen of Naples being conveyed to Rome. They sought refuge there under the protection of French bayonets, in the cheerless shelter of the empty Farnese Palace. Five days after the fall of Gaeta Victor Emmanuel summoned the first Italian Parliament to Turin, where it met in a large wooden hall improvised for the occasion. In his speech from the throne he regretted the recall of the French Minister, but did not pretend to be downcast by the platonic rebuke of France. As to the protest of Prussia against his policy, Victor Emmanuel said an ambassador had been sent to King William “in token of respect for him personally, and of sympathy with the noble German nation,” which he hoped would become convinced that Italian unity could not prejudice the rights of other states. The meaning of this reference in the speech was pointed out by De la Marmora. He cynically told the Prussian Government at Berlin, that Italy consoled herself with the thought that she had set an example which Prussia, in spite of her protests, would find useful “in conquering the hegemony of Germany.” On the 17th of March the Turin Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, and two days afterwards England recognised his position. France delayed her recognition till June, Napoleon’s chief difficulty being the disposal of Rome. Opportunity, said Italian statesmen, will open the way to Venice; and as for Rome, though it must be the capital of free Italy, we only desire to go there, not at the head of a revolutionary army, but hand in hand with France. Personally, Napoleon would have wished to evacuate Rome. Its occupation was a heavy burden on his finances—which had become seriously embarrassed. To uphold the temporal power of the Pope, which he had disavowed, against the will of the Italian people, which in other quarters he had enforced by the sword, put him in a false position. On the other hand, the priests in France had to be conciliated, and there was a strong party among Frenchmen who thought that France should be compensated, by the occupation of Rome, for the rise of a new naval Power in the Mediterranean.[98] Early in the summer Cavour, who like Themistocles lived to convert a small state into a great one, died—his policy being cherished as a sacred legacy by his successor, Riccasoli. Cavour, however, lived long enough to see the failure of an intrigue to procure the evacuation of Rome by the cession of Sardinia to France. Mr. Kinglake in July tried to convince the House of Commons that this cession was practically agreed on, and he pointed out that Nelson had declared Malta would be useless to England whenever the Bay of Cagliari passed into the hands of a great naval power. But Lord John Russell—in the last speech he ever made in the Lower House—assured the country that he could find no evidence pointing to the existence of such a scheme. At the same time he made it plain, though he did not say so in as many words, that England would regard the cession of Sardinia to France as a casus belli.[99]
Another project was on foot which gave the Queen great uneasiness. Napoleon—whose brain, said Lord Palmerston once, was as full of schemes as a warren was full of rabbits—was said to be in favour of creating a new Eastern State or kingdom, with Constantinople as its capital, and King Leopold, the Queen’s uncle, as its Sovereign. In that case France would naturally take Belgium by way of compensation; but the idea, if ever seriously entertained, was soon consigned to the limbo of vanished Imperial dreams. The condition of Austria was now rather serious. All her proposals for reforming the political system of Hungary, relegated that ancient kingdom to the position of an Austrian province. The Hungarian people, however, refused to accept this position, and demanded the restoration of their rights as an independent State under the Sovereign of Austria, reigning over them as crowned King of Hungary. Their demand might at any moment take the form of a revolutionary movement, which would probably re-open the Eastern question, and involve England in war. Luckily this calamity was averted by the preoccupation of Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel, who alone had either the power or the will to raise a revolution in Hungary.
But affairs in the North were much more disquieting. Early in March the dispute between Denmark and the Duchies of Sleswig-Holstein, which the Queen and her husband had watched with jealous eyes from its origin, became acute. The Danish Government was willing to submit the budget for the Duchies to their local legislatures, on condition that it was not altered. The German Diet or Bund declared that this was equivalent to an assertion that territory which was really subject to the authority of the Bund, was under the exclusive Sovereign authority of Denmark. The three non-German Great Powers declared that Denmark ought to yield to the Duchies their constitutional rights, and laid it down that if this were not done, the German Bund might justly force concessions from Denmark, by Federal execution in Sleswig-Holstein. Denmark ignored the award and threats of the Powers, and Prussia took up the cause of the Sleswigers. In England the Prussian Government was sneered at for menacing Denmark because she denied the Duchies the right to control their Budgets, whilst it raised money for its own military purposes without the consent of its own subjects.
Other than political anxieties made the spring of 1861 dismal to the Queen. On the 12th of March she had visited her mother, the Duchess of Kent, at Frogmore, and found her suffering great pain from the effects of a surgical operation which had been performed to relieve an abscess in her arm. On the 15th Her Majesty and her husband were inspecting the Horticultural Society’s gardens at South Kensington, when they were summoned by Sir James Clark to the bedside of the Duchess of Kent, who began to develop feverish symptoms. When they arrived they found her dying. “I knelt before her,” writes the Queen, “kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me.... I went out to sob,” adds Her Majesty, stricken to the heart at finding, for the first time in her life, her mother had not received her with a loving smile of recognition. All through the night the Queen watched by the bedside of the dying Princess, weeping as she thought of her childhood and its sacred memories, and of the dreadful blank her mother’s death must make in her life. At eight in the morning of the next day (the 16th) Prince Albert persuaded the Queen to leave her mother’s room for a little, and rest. But she could not rest. She insisted on returning to the sick-room, and when she went back she saw that her mother was passing away. The heart-beats grew fainter; the eyes slowly closed, and as the clock struck half-past nine, Prince Albert took the Queen out of the room, and she knew all was over. For forty-one years she had not been parted from her mother save for a few brief weeks at a time. Now they were parted for ever on this side of the grave. “I seemed,” she writes, “to have lived through a life, to have become old.” The death of the Duchess of Kent plunged the Royal household in grief. She died leaving not one dry eye behind her among those who had known and served and loved her. The Princess Frederick William of Prussia hurried to her mother’s side, arriving at Windsor on the 18th; and then from every quarter, letters and messages of condolence came pouring in. Addresses of sympathy were carried in both Houses of Parliament, and every effort was made by Ministers to lighten the anxieties of the Queen at a time when sorrow lay heavily on her heart. The funeral took place on the 25th, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the body was laid till a mausoleum at Frogmore could be built. “I and my girls,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold on that day, “prayed at home together, and dwelt on her happiness and peace.” On the 2nd of April the Princess Frederick William returned to Berlin, and the Queen and her husband retired to Osborne. The Easter recess had produced a lull in politics, and it might have been expected that the Queen would have been permitted to mourn her bereavement in peace. It was not so. On the 12th of April she was deeply pained to find the Times renewing its old attacks on Prince Albert, and again accusing him of thwarting Lord Palmerston’s Italian policy in the interests of his German relatives. For this cruel imputation there was no warrant, save the fact that Austria persisted in holding Venetia, which had been guaranteed to her by the pact of Villafranca, in spite of Lord Palmerston’s recommendation that she should cede the province to Italy.
MR. (AFTERWARDS VISCOUNT) CARDWELL.
(From a Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company.)
On the 15th of April the Prince Consort, writing to Stockmar, says, “Home politics have gone asleep.” Before the recess the position of the Ministry had been easily maintained, simply because Mr. Disraeli was of opinion that premature Tory attacks on it might heal the schism between Palmerston and the Radicals. But the weakness of the Cabinet in the House of Commons was illustrated in March, when Palmerston had—as we have seen—to help the Tories to throw out Mr. Locke-King’s Bill for reducing the county franchise to £10, in return for their support of his resolution reversing an adverse vote on the payment of the Navy. It was also illustrated by Mr. Dunlop’s motion for an inquiry into the mutilation of the Afghan Blue Book in 1839. Lord Palmerston (who had been Foreign Secretary) was accused of having created the disastrous Afghan War, simply because he would not believe the reports of his own agents in Afghanistan. To excuse the disasters of the campaign he had hacked and garbled the despatches in the most unscrupulous manner, so as to make it appear that these agents reported the very opposite of what they actually told him. Mr. Dunlop had unearthed evidence to prove this charge, and he proved it up to the hilt. Palmerston’s only defence was that the mutilations complained of were quite regular, and were made in the public interest. “The Commons,” writes Count Vitzthum, “were extremely indignant, and nothing but Disraeli’s intervention saved the Ministry. Lord Derby,” Count Vitzthum goes on to say, “is on the most friendly footing with his political opponent, Lord Granville. The latter added to a business letter a postscript, with the question, ‘When will you turn us out?’ The Tory chief answered, ‘I am thinking day and night how I can manage to keep you in, but it will be devilish difficult.”[100] Mr. Disraeli had set his face against taking office till he had a trustworthy majority in the House of Commons that would enable him to carry out a foreign policy even in the teeth of Lord Palmerston’s opposition. The aim of the Opposition was, therefore, to keep Palmerston in power till this majority was obtained. It was feared, however, that the Government might fall on their Budget, and its production was awaited with intense interest on the 15th of April, when Mr. Gladstone made his financial statement. Dismal predictions of a large deficit had been promulgated. On the contrary, though the revenue had fallen off considerably, there had been an equivalent saving in expenditure, and on the year’s work the deficit was only £855,000 when the accounts were balanced. Mr. Gladstone’s estimates for the current year, however, after providing for this deficit, showed a surplus on the basis of existing taxation of about £2,000,000; so he was able to take a penny off the income-tax, and at last to repeal the Paper Duty, without incurring the reproach of rashly sacrificing revenue. But to do this he had to leave the duties on tea and sugar unaltered. To prevent the Peers from rejecting the repeal of the Paper Duty, he tacked his scheme on to the Bill containing all his financial proposals. The House of Lords shrank from rejecting the whole Budget: they passed it grudgingly, after a feeble and futile threat of opposition from the Duke of Rutland. In the Commons a majority of 15 in a House of 577 members carried the Budget of 1861, which is memorable as the one that abolished what was popularly called “the taxes on knowledge.” The financial debates in the House did not end till Mr. Gladstone had shown pretty clearly that he thought too much money was being spent on the Army and Navy. On the other hand, Lord John Russell took occasion, in a debate on Italian affairs, to declare that the state of Europe rendered this expenditure necessary. The assumption here was that events abroad might falsify Mr. Gladstone’s estimates, which showed a surplus. In that case, as the Paper Duty could not be re-imposed, any deficit must be met by an increased income-tax, and it was this fear that rendered the Whigs and the Tories alike anxious to retain the Paper Duty. But the Cabinet was too weak to dispense with Mr. Gladstone’s services. As the price of his allegiance to Palmerston was the repeal of the Paper Duty, and the consequent humiliation of the House of Lords, who had threatened to oppose its abolition, Palmerston had to submit to the Paper Duty being repealed. Still, the Premier was not without his consolations. The dispute with the Prussian Government over Captain Macdonald’s grievances had not terminated, and on the 26th of April Lord Palmerston seized the opportunity it afforded him of making a coarse and undignified attack on Prussia because her laws, which in Macdonald’s case he admitted had not been overstepped, were “harsh, unjust, arbitrary, and violent.” This provoked recriminations in the Berlin Chamber, where Baron Schleinitz foolishly mixed up Captain Macdonald’s arrest with high policy. To these recriminations the Times delivered an insulting reply, and, greatly to the annoyance of the grief-stricken Queen, a rancorous quarrel was thus developed about a trivial affair between the two Governments, which, said the Prince Consort, made the “outlook most melancholy.” Mr. Disraeli told Count Vitzthum that Palmerston’s outburst against Prussia was delivered in order to annoy the Prince Consort rather than the Berlin Cabinet, and if that were the fact it must be allowed that his malignity was eminently successful. It was, in truth, so ill-concealed at this time that Mr. Disraeli himself said he was puzzled to account for the Prime Minister’s “grudge” against Prince Albert.[101]
On the 27th of April the Queen announced the approaching marriage of the Princess Alice and Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, which was approved by Parliament on the 4th of May. On the 6th the Princess was voted a dowry of £30,000 and an annuity of £6,000 a year. During Whitsuntide the Queen’s birthday was celebrated at Osborne quietly and without the usual festivities, her holiday being marred not only by the nervous prostration which affected her after her mother’s death, but by the illness of Prince Leopold, who was smitten by a severe attack of measles which he caught from Prince Louis of Hesse.
The death of Cavour on the 6th of June was followed by the recognition of the kingdom of Italy by France on the 25th in response to an appeal from Riccasoli. He knew that till this recognition was given, it would be difficult for the Italian Government to raise the loans necessary to construct those railways and other public works which were urgently needed to develope the resources of the new kingdom. This recognition, however, implied that for a time the Italian question must be shelved. It was therefore with great satisfaction that England now saw the triumph of her policy, though this satisfaction was allayed somewhat by the rumour that Sardinia was to be ceded to France. Sir J. Hudson told Baron Riccasoli that such a cession would be taken by England as a casus belli, a warning which elicited from him a fervent denial that Victor Emmanuel would ever sanction such a transaction.
BALMORAL CASTLE, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST.
(From a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co., Aberdeen.)
Meanwhile the Queen, still sad at heart and depressed in spirits, struggled bravely to perform her social duties. She held two Drawing-rooms and two Investitures before June was over. Visitors, too, came to comfort her in her sorrow. The King of the Belgians and his son, and the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia and their children arrived in midsummer. They were followed in rapid succession by others, including some members of the Orleans family, the Archduke Maximilian, and the Archduchess Charlotte, the Princess
THE ROYAL TOUR IN IRELAND: THE VISIT TO ROSS CASTLE, KILLARNEY.
Charles of Hesse, and the King of Sweden, who arrived in August. But it was a year fruitful in sorrow for the Queen and her family. Mr. Sidney Herbert had early in the year accepted a peerage, and retired to the Upper House as Lord Herbert of Lea. In July he fell ill, and to the great grief of the Queen, who regarded him as the future Prime Minister, died in August. In him the Peelites lost the Bayard of their party. On the 25th of July a great gap was made in the ranks of the Ministry in the Lower House by the elevation of Lord John Russell to the peerage as Earl Russell of Kingston Russell.[102] “The comments of the newspapers,” wrote Count Vitzthum, “on Lord John Russell’s acceptance of a peerage read like funeral sermons,” and his farewell speech to the House of Commons, broadly hinting that England would make the cession of the island of Sardinia to France a casus belli, rang like a thunderclap through Europe. It was more effective than his farewell address to his constituents. In this document, when reviewing the exploits of his career, Lord Russell modestly compared himself to the Emperor Charles V., who, having been engaged in all the great affairs of his age, and desiring to see how the world would get on after his death, had the dark pageant of his funeral prepared, and officiated as his own chief mourner at the ceremony. One of the last events of the Session was a spirited debate on the 26th of June on the demand of the Government for £200,000 for new ironclads. Palmerston, by dwelling on the growth of the French navy, frightened Parliament into granting the money, and the Manchester Radicals were fain to hold their peace. Mr. Disraeli, however, rather leant to the Peace Party in this debate. He suggested that diplomacy might effect a friendly understanding with France which would fix the relative proportions between the two navies, but his followers, who were bellicose, listened to him with amazement and anger. It did not occur to them that he was already speculating on the prospect of being in office next year, and was preparing the way for a friendly reception at the Tuileries.
It was a tranquil Session, during which hardly one party division was challenged in the Lower House. Though Lord John (now Earl) Russell had virtually abandoned his Reform Bill, the artisans in some of the large towns still kept alive the agitation for Parliamentary Reform. The country, however, seemed apathetic on the subject. How to give the best of the working men votes without at the same time enfranchising those who were unworthy, seemed to most people an insoluble problem. The American Civil War and the triumph of the Protectionists in Australia also rendered Englishmen somewhat sceptical as to the beneficial results of a democratic franchise. A Bankruptcy Bill was carried. It was not a party measure, and it was the only Ministerial Bill bearing on domestic affairs the passing of which in 1861 calls for record. When Parliament was prorogued on the 6th of August, the only shadow on the horizon of the future discernible by the Queen was the prospect of a cotton famine in Lancashire. Her Majesty’s anxiety on this subject was also apparently shared by Lord Palmerston. Writing to Mr. Milner Gibson about the matter in June, Lord Palmerston wistfully asked if the Board of Trade or any other department had any means of helping the country to make good the deficiency in the cotton supply which the Civil War in America was sure to cause. “As to our manufacturers,” he writes, “they will do nothing unless directed and pushed on. They are some of the most helpless and shortsighted of men. They are like the people who held out their dishes and prayed that it might rain plum-puddings. They think it is enough to open their mill-gates, and that cotton will come of its own accord. They say they have for years been looking to India as a source of supply; but their looks seem to have had only the effect of the eyes of the rattlesnake, namely, to paralyse the object looked at, and as yet it has shown no signs of falling into their jaws.”[103]
On the 16th of August the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia and their children left Osborne for Germany. Next day her Majesty, the Prince Consort, and the Princess Alice visited the grave of the Duchess of Kent at Frogmore, celebrating there in sorrow a birthday anniversary which had hitherto brought joy every year to the Royal circle. They placed wreaths on the tomb, and felt, writes the Queen to King Leopold, “that it was only the earthly robe of her we loved so much that was there—the pure, tender, loving spirit is above, and free from all suffering and woe.... The first birthday in another world, must have been a far brighter one than any birthday in the poor world below.”[104]
The time had now come when the Queen had to make preparations for a visit to Ireland which she had planned. On the 21st of August her Majesty, the Prince Consort, Prince Alfred—fresh from his West Indian cruise—and the Princesses Alice and Helena, started for Holyhead, which they reached at seven o’clock in the evening. They arrived at Kingstown at midnight, and next morning (22nd August), accompanied by Lord Carlisle, the Lord-Lieutenant, his Chief Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, and Sir George Brown, Commander of the Forces in Ireland, they proceeded to Dublin. Despite the wet and stormy weather, the populace gave their Royal visitors a cordial reception. Next morning (23rd August) the Prince Consort visited the Curragh Camp to see for himself how the Prince of Wales was progressing with his military studies there, and the Queen received a loyal address from the Lord Mayor and Corporation of Dublin. In the afternoon the Royal party drove through the city, where crowds cheered them loudly wherever they went, and in the evening they met at dinner the Duke of Leinster, the Marquis and Marchioness of Headfort, the Marquis and Marchioness of Kildare, and Lady Charlemont. On Saturday, the 24th, the Queen herself visited the Curragh Camp, and reviewed the troops there. As they passed the cavalry one of the bands began to play an air which had been a favourite with the Duchess of Kent, and repeated it on marching past. “This,” wrote the Queen in her Diary, “entirely upset me, and the tears would have flowed freely had I not checked them by a violent effort. But I felt sad the whole day till I came to Bertie (the Prince of Wales), who looked so well.”[105] Then came some field manœuvres, and a visit to “Bertie’s hut,” where the whole party, with Sir George Brown, General Ridley, Colonels Wetherell, Browning, and Percy—the latter of whom had the Prince of Wales under his care—partook of a comfortable luncheon. The Queen thanked Colonel Percy very warmly “for treating Bertie as he did like any other officer, for,” she says in her Diary, “I know he keeps him up to his work in a way, as General Bruce told me, no one else has done; and yet Bertie likes him very much.” On Sunday afternoon the Queen visited the Kilmainham Hospital, and on Monday (August 26th) celebrated her husband’s birthday. “Alas!” she writes to King Leopold, “there is so much so different this year—nothing festive, and we on a journey, and separated from many of our children, and my spirits bad.”
THE EAGLE’S NEST, KILLARNEY.
(After a Photograph by W. Lawrence, Dublin.)
In the afternoon the Queen and her family left the Viceregal Lodge for Killarney, and, recording her impressions on the road, her Majesty dwells on the sparseness of the population, and the scarcity of villages and towns. At Thurles she notes how the crowd shrieked rather than cheered, how “wild and dark-looking” the people were, and how handsome the girls seemed, despite their dishevelled hair. At Killarney the Queen was received by Lord Castlerosse, Mr. Herbert of Muckross Abbey, the General commanding the district, and the Mayor, who presented a loyal address. Guarded by a strong escort of troops, her Majesty drove amidst cheering crowds to Lord Castlerosse’s house, which was so charmingly picturesque that she sketched it on her arrival. At dinner in the evening she met the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr. Moriarty—whom she describes as “a tall, stout, and very intelligent, clever man.”—the Knight of Kerry, and a brother of O’Connell’s, whose views her
KING WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA (AFTERWARDS EMPEROR OF GERMANY).
Majesty found more to her liking than those of the Liberator. On the 27th the Queen spent most of her time on the lakes in this lovely and romantic spot—the close, warm, humid atmosphere being the only drawback to her delightful tour. In the evening Muckross was visited, and next day (28th August), after driving round Muckross Lake, the Queen went on that splendid sheet of water, and admired especially the excellent rowing of the boatmen. Very reluctantly did the Queen bid farewell to her kind hosts on the 29th of August, when she hastened back to her yacht at Kingstown. At nine next morning she reached Holyhead, where she rested, while the Prince Consort and her suite made an excursion to Carnarvon. Leaving Holyhead in the evening, and travelling all night, the Royal party reached Balmoral on the 30th of August.
The affairs of Germany had now drifted into such a critical condition that the Prince Consort felt bound to explain to the King of Prussia the views of the English Court on this subject. All over the Fatherland the people, stirred by the success of the movement in Italy for unity, were forming political clubs, and Prussia, to whom they looked for leadership, was disappointing them by refusing to reform her internal administration. Prince Albert, writing to the King of Prussia, took the popular German view—pointing out how Austria had ever worked for the purpose of weakening the Fatherland, and how she had once more given to France, after her victories in Italy, a strong position on the Rhine. “Is it an evil trait of the spirit of the people,” asks the Prince, “if they yearn for general unity and active co-operation in what is to decide their destiny? Do not allow yourself to be annoyed or misled if here and there the people are guilty of stupid extravagances. They and you are Germany’s only stay, and the power by which alone the enemy can be held at bay. It is not a Cavour that Germany needs, but a Stein.” It has been said that the Queen and her husband were not consistent in their policy, because, while they showed little sympathy for the national movement in Italy, they always encouraged the same movement in Germany. To them it must be remembered that the former movement was an anti-German one. They believed that if Austria lost Venetia, Galicia, Hungary, and Poland, Germany would be crushed—because they assumed that these nations, like the new kingdom of Italy, would be under the hostile influence of France. The mistake which they made in the case of Italy lay in supposing that political gratitude is stronger than the love of national independence.
During this autumn the Prince of Wales visited Germany, ostensibly to be present at the military manœuvres in the Rhine Provinces, but really to make the acquaintance of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark at Speyer and Heidelberg, where she happened to be staying, and where, according to the Prince Consort, “the young people seem to have taken a warm liking for each other when they first met.[106] The visit of the King of Prussia to Compiègne somewhat disturbed the mind of the country, for it set afloat rumours of an alliance with France, one result of which might perhaps be a scheme for the unification of Germany, with Belgium and the Rhine Provinces playing the part which was allotted to Nice and Savoy in the scheme for unifying Italy. The Queen and her husband, however, knew that the visit was purely one of ceremonial courtesy, and that no attempt had been made to inveigle Prussia into any such conspiracy. This information was communicated to the Cabinet, and soon all disquieting rumours ceased.
On the 18th of October the King of Prussia was crowned at Königsberg, and Lord Clarendon, who was present as representing the Queen, congratulated her Majesty on the charming manner in which the Crown Princess did homage to her father-in-law. King William I. was desirous of conferring the Order of the Black Eagle on Lord Clarendon, but the Queen begged him not to offer it, because it was against the traditions of the English Foreign Office to permit a subject to accept such a distinction.[107] Lord Clarendon mixed very freely in society at Berlin, and was able to report to the Queen that the attacks of the Times on everything Prussian would have damaged the position of the Crown Princess, had it not been safeguarded and secured by her own high personal qualities. These attacks broke out afresh over the King’s seeming assertion of the principle of Divine Right in his Address to the Chambers, and Clarendon begged the Queen to remonstrate with Lord Palmerston, who was supposed to influence the Times. Though Lord Palmerston, in one of his letters, penned a high-spirited reply to a Royal communication on the subject, it is a curious coincidence that the attacks of which her Majesty complained suddenly ceased from this moment.
On leaving Balmoral the Court proceeded to Holyrood, and on the 23rd of October the Prince Consort laid the foundation stones of the new Post Office and the Industrial Museum in Edinburgh. The Queen and her family reached Windsor on the same evening, where her Majesty’s grief broke out afresh, as it was the first time she had lived at the Castle without finding her mother at Frogmore. As Sovereign of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, the Queen held her first investiture of Knights at Windsor Castle on the 1st of November. The difficulty which perplexed the Indian Government in establishing this Order had been to find for it a suitable name and an appropriate device. The suggestions of the Prince Consort had a few months before been in the main adopted, and many fantastic ideas had been extinguished by the cold douche of his common sense. It had been settled that the Order was to consist of the Indian Viceroy as Grand Master, and twenty-five Knights, together with such extraordinary Knights as the Queen might appoint. The badge was to be an oval onyx cameo suspended from an Imperial crown in the centre of the collar, and on the stone Her Majesty’s head was cut in high relief, the motto being “Heaven’s Light Our Guide.” The jewel was surmounted by a star, and set in diamonds. The ceremony of investiture was held in high state. The Queen having previously conferred the Order on the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales, entered the Throne Room wearing the sumptuous Mantle of the Order. After the usual formalities, she invested with the Insignia, of the Order, Lord Harris, Lord Gough, Lord Clyde, His Highness the Maharajah Duleep Singh, Sir John Lawrence, and Sir George Pollock.
INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM, EDINBURGH.
At Windsor the Prince Consort now began to make arrangements for the approaching marriage of the Princess Alice, and the journey of Prince Leopold, then in delicate health, to Cannes. He busied himself also with the preparation of Marlborough House as a residence for the Prince of Wales. On the 4th of November he inspected the works at Wellington College. A brilliant company of guests, including the Grand Duke and Duchess Constantine, the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Granville, Earl and Countess Russell, Lord Sydney, and the Baron and Baroness Brunnow, were at the Castle when the birthday of the Prince of Wales was celebrated on the 9th. The death of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, from typhoid fever, together with sad memories of the late Duchess of Kent, had somewhat darkened this family festival, and in a few days her Majesty and the Prince Consort were still further shocked to hear that the King of Portugal had also fallen a victim to the disease which had cut short his brother’s life. The attachment which existed between the Prince Consort and the Portuguese branch of the House of Coburg was close and tender, and it is certain that the sudden death of King Pedro and his brother weighed heavily on his heart. The Crown Princess of Prussia was suffering from illness, brought on by the fatigues and excitement of the coronation ceremony, and, as the last letter the Prince Consort ever wrote to Stockmar indicates, this also preyed on his mind. To these troubles were added certain private vexations, hinted at, but not specified by Sir Theodore Martin. The Prince began to look ill, and his irritability amazed his household, every member of which loved him for his serene temper, his imperturbable good humour, and his invincible patience. On the 12th of November the Queen
THE QUEEN HOLDING THE FIRST INVESTITURE OF THE ORDER OF THE STAR OF INDIA.
began to notice that her husband’s repeated journeys to London were making him “low and sad.” His sleeplessness returned, and her Majesty pressed Sir C. Phipps to lighten as much as possible the strain on his energies. On the 22nd of November he inspected the buildings of Sandhurst Military College amidst a downpour of rain, and it was at first thought he here caught the illness which sent him to his grave. On the 23rd, though complaining of malaise, he went out shooting with Prince Ernest of Leiningen. On the 24th he complained of rheumatic pains, but walked with the Queen and her family to Frogmore. Next day (Monday) he went to Cambridge to see the Prince of Wales, who found him “greatly out of sorts,” and when he came back to Windsor he was so ill that he could not walk out with the Queen in the afternoon. On the 26th he was worse; on the 28th he was still worse, and greatly grieved at the seizure by the Americans of the Confederate Commissioners, who were passengers in the English mail steamer Trent. During the next two days the Prince still complained of illness, and when, on the 1st of December, he drafted a memorandum—the last he ever wrote—for the Queen on the Trent affair, he could scarcely hold his pen. Yet he had struggled against his malady, and during the two previous days had appeared among his guests—including the Duc de Nemours, Lord Carlisle, and Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone—as best he could. But he ate nothing, and when he went to bed he complained of shivering with cold. On the 2nd of December Sir James Clark and Dr. Jenner pronounced him to be suffering from low fever. Curiously enough, when Lord Methuen called on him to report on the death of the King of Portugal he said he was glad his disease was not typhoid fever, because he knew he could not survive an attack. Lord Palmerston was a guest at the Castle on the 2nd, and when he found that the Prince was still unable to take food or leave his room he suggested that another physician should be called in. The Queen could not bring herself to believe that her husband was seriously ill, and on the 3rd her opinion was confirmed by that of Sir James Clark, for the Prince slept better that night and so Palmerston’s suggestion was overruled. Next day even Sir James Clark admitted there was no improvement, and that the symptoms were discouraging. On the 4th of December the Queen says she found the Prince “very woebegone and wretched.” He had not slept, and his appetite had gone. He seemed to care for nothing save that his daughter, the Princess Alice, should sit by him and read to him. His irritability extended even to the selection of books, and it was not till the Princess began to read Scott’s “Talisman” to him that he was satisfied. Sir James Clark still consoled the Queen with smooth prognostications; but Dr. Jenner told her that the Prince must eat because he was simply starving to death. On the 5th he began to marvel what kind of illness it could be that clung to him so persistently, and how long it would last. Clark, however, reported that he was somewhat better, and the Queen was again deceived by delusive signs of improvement. He still begged the Princess Alice to read to him, and nothing else seemed to soothe his irritability. On the 6th he rose early and talked to the Queen about his illness. She told him it sprang from overwork, to which he replied: “It is too much. You must speak to the Ministers.”[108] His mind, he remarked, had begun to brood over Rosenau and the scenes of his childhood, and when he said that the Queen felt as if her heart were breaking. For by this time the physicians could not conceal from themselves the gravity of the case. The Prince was obviously suffering from typhoid fever, and Dr. Jenner broke the news to her Majesty as softly and kindly as he could. Still, they told her the symptoms were not bad, and she tried to think of those who had been smitten with typhoid fever and had survived. On the 7th the Queen worked hard—harder than ever she had worked in her life; for her husband’s pen was no longer at her service. She herself has said that “the tears fell fast” as she sat by his bedside watching him and thinking of the shipwreck of their plans, “and of the painful loss this long illness would be, publicly as well as privately.”
On the 8th the Prince felt so well that he begged to be moved into a larger room, and as he lay in the sunshine he asked the Princess Alice to play for him some of his favourite German chorales. Tears came to his eyes as her fingers wandered over the keys. Suddenly he cried out, “Das reicht hin”—“that is enough”—and then the music was mute. Charles Kingsley preached that Sunday in the Chapel, but the Queen, who attended service, says in her Diary, “I heard nothing.” In the afternoon she sat by her husband and read “Peveril of the Peak,” he holding her hand, and occasionally murmuring words of love and tenderness. Lord Palmerston, himself disabled with gout, could no longer conceal his anxiety. He and his colleagues again pressed the Queen to call in some other physician, and Sir James Clark and Dr. Jenner accordingly sent for Sir H. Holland and Dr. (afterwards Sir Thomas) Watson. The Prince, after seeing the latter, spoke hopefully, and told the Queen that he was “quite the right man”—but still they noticed as a distressing sign that his mind had an increasing tendency to wander. On the 10th Lord Palmerston again urged that further medical advice should be obtained, and by this time the public were becoming alarmed at the condition of the patient. Still, ere the evening wore away even Dr. Watson admitted that the Prince had improved. But on the 11th the Queen, on visiting him in the morning to give him some beef-tea, noticed how his face, “more beautiful than ever, had grown so thin.” As she assisted him to his sofa, he stopped to look at a picture on china of the Madonna, saying, “It helps me through half the day.” The doctors, it seems, felt uneasy towards the evening, when they discovered that the Prince had begun to breathe with more difficulty. The Queen read to him during the greater part of the day, and he manifested great reluctance to let her leave him, even when her duty called her away for a few minutes. On the 12th the bad symptoms increased, and Palmerston wrote three letters, in quick succession, to Sir C. Phipps, each more distracted than the other. On the 13th Dr. Jenner had to warn the Queen that congestion of the lungs might set in, and she herself saw that her husband had become much weaker. But all through the night comforting reports were brought to her, and next morning, the 14th, Mr. Brown, the Royal apothecary, told her that Prince Albert was over the crisis. She went straight to his bedside. “I went in,” she writes, “and never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked, lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright, gazing as it were at unseen objects, and not taking notice of me.”[109] Hour after hour, as she watched by the sick bed, the Queen saw that her husband was slowly sinking. Still, in the afternoon he knew her—for as he laid his weary head on her shoulder, he kissed her and muttered, “Gutes frauchen.” Then his mind would wander, and then he would doze in brief and troubled snatches of sleep. He took his children by the hand when they came and kissed him, but it is doubtful if he now knew them. Late in the afternoon he asked for Sir Charles Phipps, who came and kissed his hand, whereupon he again closed his eyes. So he lingered on, the Queen keeping her mournful watch with breaking heart. At a late hour they changed his bed, and on the Queen pointing to a favourable sign, Dr. Jenner told her that the Prince’s breathing rendered all favourable signs of no avail. At last she went to her room, but returned when she heard the breathing grow worse. The Prince was partially conscious, for when she kissed him and whispered, “Es ist kleines Frauchen”—“’Tis your own little wife”—he kissed her also. But he seemed desirous of being left quite undisturbed, and so she retired to her room to weep. The end was coming fast. Clark soon saw that a serious change for the worse was setting in, and the Princess Alice went to summon the Queen. When she came she found the Prince still breathing, and she knelt at the bedside, taking his cold hand in hers. On the opposite side knelt the Princess Alice—at the foot of the bed the Prince of Wales and the Princess Helena. The doctors, Generals Bruce and Grey, Sir Charles Phipps, the Dean of Windsor, Prince Ernest of Leiningen, and the faithful valet, Löhlein, stood around hushed and grief-stricken, and the sobs of those to whom the Prince was dearest alone broke the stillness of the chamber of death. The dying man’s face grew serenely soft and reposeful, as his breathing became feebler and feebler. At last he strove hard to take a long, deep breath. In this effort he passed away to his last, long rest, as the great clock of the Castle struck the third quarter after the tenth hour of the night. Those who heard the doleful chime at the Prince’s deathbed will never forget it.
“Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever look’d with human eyes.”
Of the grief that broke the widowed heart of the Queen it is not becoming to speak here. The veil of silence must be drawn over a crisis in her life too sacred, and too tragical even for her children’s eyes. But through England a great wave of sorrow swept over the hearts of men when they became conscious of all that the Prince Consort’s death might imply. Political partisans whose waywardness had harassed the Prince during his life, were not unmoved by the touching story of his last days. Some were even ready to drop a remorseful tear over his grave, when they remembered how eagerly they had, for base party purposes, too often wounded the proud but gentle heart which would now beat no more. The voice of calumny was silenced at last. The Times newspaper, which had pursued the Prince with ungenerous criticism throughout his life, had, to quote the Queen’s own words in a memorandum which she wrote on this painful subject, in January, 1862, “the most beautiful articles on him when he died.” Lord Palmerston also shared in the general grief, and his biographer says that he felt the death of the Prince Consort most acutely, and looked upon it as an irreparable loss. Indeed, he was almost melodramatic in his manifestations of remorse when in presence of a member of the Royal Family. The Duke of Cambridge,
THE PRINCESS ALICE READING TO HER FATHER.
for example, considered it his duty to inform Palmerston of the sad event, and was utterly astounded at the effect the news had on him. He told Count Vitzthum that “the Prime Minister was so affected that he had fainted away several times in the presence of the Duke, who expected him to have a fit of apoplexy, and still fears that his days are numbered.” Count Vitzthum, however, adds significantly:—“He (Palmerston) recovered again in the afternoon so far as to be able to receive Baron Brunnow, who perceived nothing unusual about him.”[110] Mr. Hayward has stated that the news of the Prince Consort’s death so affected Lord Palmerston that he had a violent attack of gout.[111] According to Mr. Ashley, the Prime Minister was suffering from gout before it was suspected that the Prince Consort was dangerously ill; though, no doubt, Mr. Hayward rightly accounts for Lord Palmerston’s demonstrative emotion when he explains that he was afraid of the effect of the Prince’s death on the Queen. But this apprehension as to the weakness of her Majesty’s nerves must have quickly worn away, for when he visited her at Osborne, on the 29th of January, 1862, for the first time after the Prince’s death, he not only neglected to put on mourning, but enhanced the gaiety of his raiment by wearing green gloves and blue studs.[112]
The English people, however, had on the whole judged the Prince Consort generously through life, and they mourned over his death with genuine and unaffected sincerity. Never since the death of the Princess Charlotte was the grief of the people more widespread and more real. Friar Francis says of Hero’s supposed death—
“That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why, then we rack the value.”
Some such feeling as this was universal when, amidst the gloom that tinged the skirts of the dying year with hues of sorrow, the nation reviewed Prince Albert’s career, so full of usefulness, of self-restraint, of high aim, of patriotic purpose, of unselfish devotion. Very beautiful and touching, too, were the popular expressions of sympathy which were sent to the widowed Queen, the light of whose life had been extinguished at one fell stroke.
Till Count Vitzthum’s “Reminiscences” appeared, little that was authentic had been published as to the personal history of the Queen during the first days of her widowhood. “Just as the Queen had failed,” writes Count Vitzthum, who obtained his information from the Duke of Cambridge, “to recognise the danger till the last moment, so also she appears not to have realised, for the first few days after all was over, the full extent of her loss. Her composure was almost unnatural, and it was not till her return to Osborne that she awoke to the full consciousness of this unexpected blow. ‘Her Majesty is unnaturally quiet,’ was the remark of an eye-witness two days after the event.” The Duchess of Cambridge was the first member of the Royal Family who ventured to write to the Queen. She described the answer of the Princess Alice as “heartrending.” Her Majesty sat all day in dumb despair, staring vacantly round her, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Royal sign manual could be obtained for the most urgent business. The wise, strong affection and the capable energy of the Princess Alice, however, spared her Majesty from many anxieties at the moment when her grief was keenest. Lord Granville was the first Minister she was able to see, and she transacted some business with him a few days after the Prince’s death. Sir Charles Phipps, too, strove hard to lighten the burden of sovereignty for his Royal mistress in the darkest hours of her life; but his efforts, though well meant, gave rise to misunderstandings. “I hear,” writes Lord Malmesbury in his Diary, on the 28th of December, “that Ministers have signed a memorial to the Queen refusing to transact business with her through Sir C. Phipps.” From a constitutional point of view Palmerston and his colleagues were right in taking this course. Whether it was generous, or even wise, to annoy the Queen at such a moment with their cruelly conscientious pedantry is not a question that admits of much argument.[113] Her Majesty was able to hold her first Privy Council, after the Prince’s death, on the 11th of January, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Granville, and Sir George Grey being in attendance. The chief point under discussion was that of summoning Parliament.
The Duke of Newcastle, who was a valued friend of the Prince Consort,, had a quiet conversation with her Majesty early in January, before she left Windsor for Osborne. “His account of the Queen,” writes Mr. Hayward in a letter to Lady Emily Peel, “is highly favourable. He said his private interview left him with the very highest opinion of her strength of character.”[114] After retiring to Osborne, however, nervous exhaustion seriously impaired her strength. Lady Ely told Lord Malmesbury that during the first weeks at Osborne her Majesty seemed very low and wretched. “She (Lady Ely),” writes Lord Malmesbury on the 4th of February, 1862, “gives a sad report of the poor Queen, who talks continually about the Prince, and seems to feel comfort in doing so. She takes great pleasure in the universal feeling of sympathy for her and sorrow for him shown by all classes.”[115] King Leopold of Belgium came to Osborne in the end of January, and he endeavoured by his good offices to bring about an arrangement with Lord Palmerston for facilitating the transaction of Ministerial business with the Queen. At that time her health was not actually bad. But the King of the Belgians said that though she was outwardly composed she was not equal to the strain of dining at table, even with her half-sister, the Princess Hohenlohe, and with Prince Louis of Hesse, who were then at Osborne. She seems to have desired no other companionship in the first weeks of her widowhood save that of the Princess Alice.
Count Vitzthum was in Lisbon when the tidings of the Prince Consort’s death arrived, but he returned to London very soon afterwards. He says, “The consternation I found prevailing among all classes of the people surpassed my utmost expectations. Mr. Disraeli spoke to me with deep and heartfelt sorrow of the irreparable loss that England had sustained. ‘With Prince Albert,’ he said, ‘we have buried our Sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown. He was the permanent Private Secretary, the permanent Prime Minister of the Queen. If he had outlived some of the ‘old stagers,’ he would have given us, while retaining all constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government. Of us younger men who are qualified to enter the Cabinet, there is not one who would not willingly have bowed to his experience. We are now in the midst of a change of government. What to-morrow will bring forth no man can tell. To-day we are sailing in the deepest gloom, with night and darkness all around us.’” Some very curious details were collected by Count Vitzthum relating to the Prince Consort’s illness. On the 15th of January the Duke of Cambridge, who was then staying with his mother at Kew, invited Count Vitzthum and Count Apponyi to dinner, and from his conversation the former was able to glean the following facts:—“The illness,” writes Count Vitzthum, “which snatched away the Prince so suddenly in his forty-second year was at first nothing but a gastric fever, as his private librarian, Mr. Ruland, had informed me by letter on the day before I left for Lisbon. This so-called Windsor fever, so frequently recurrent at that season in the badly-drained town, soon, however, became typhoid. The Prince did not seem to be really ill, though as early as the 23rd or 24th of November his mind strangely wandered. His valet[116] felt instinctively what was necessary. ‘Living here will kill your Royal Highness,’ he frequently repeated. ‘You must leave Windsor and go to Germany for a time to rest and recover strength.’ These well-meant warnings passed unheeded by the patient, who showed the listlessness so foreign to his nature, but so characteristic of this disease. The most serious sign was sleeplessness and a total want of appetite. All the symptoms show that. I had the same illness myself last year. My own experience, therefore, makes me convinced that the sick man, from the indifference he showed for everything, especially for the preservation of his own life, had no idea of the danger he was in. This is the peculiarity of typhoid fever, which so completely shatters the nervous system. It requires, after timely diagnosis, complete rest and gentle treatment. When once the blood-poisoning has reached a certain stage no human aid can avail.
CAMBRIDGE COTTAGE, KEW.
“Above all things the Prince seems to have had no doctor attending him who was capable of recognising the gravity of the disease in time. Unfortunately, his physician, Dr. Bayly, had been killed in a railway accident the year before. Sir James Clark, fifty years before a distinguished physician of the old school, had virtually retired from practice, and probably had but a limited knowledge of the advance made by modern science in the treatment of typhoid diseases. As physician to the Queen his position had been for twenty years a sinecure. Her Majesty enjoys such excellent health that she does not know what it is to be ill. Hence to the last moment she clung to vain hopes in regard to the condition of her husband, which Sir James very possibly confirmed. In consequence of the urgent representations of Ministers,[117] Dr. Watson and Sir Henry Holland were summoned in addition to Dr. Jenner. Sir Henry Holland is said to have been the first to have had the courage, when it was too late, to tell the Queen the truth.
“The news of the death of King Dom Pedro, whom the Prince had loved as a son, had deeply affected him.... As he himself confessed, he hardly closed his eyes from the time he received the news till the fever actually set in. The troubles with America also embittered his last hours. He was so tired that at times he nodded off to sleep when standing. He felt always cold, and ate scarcely anything. Already in the autumn at Balmoral he had a presentiment of his death. So strong was this feeling ten days before he died that he enjoined Princess Alice, having ascertained that the Queen was not in the room, to write and tell her sister in Berlin that their father would not recover. The next day he asked the Princess whether she had done so, and she replied that she had not. On the 13th, the day before his death, he got up and transacted some business with his private secretary, Mr. Ruland. The Queen drove out, and during the drive appeared much easier about her husband’s condition. On her return she found him in bed, unconscious, and with the extremities ice-cold. Now for the first time they all realised the danger. Princess Alice, on her own responsibility, sent for the Prince of Wales, who was then at Cambridge. Sir Charles Phipps telegraphed during the night for the Duke of Cambridge, who left London by the first train on the 14th, and arrived at Windsor at 8 o’clock in the morning. The alarming symptoms had increased, and the doctors did not conceal that the Prince had only a few hours to live. The Queen alone still deceived herself with hopes, and telegraphed early on the 14th to Berlin, ‘Dear Vic., Papa has had a good night’s rest, and I hope the danger is over.’” These details are important, because they partially explain the secret of what has been to many inexplicable—the extreme sorrow that has clouded the Queen’s life during her long widowhood. It has been bitter to look back on the past and see how much might have been done that was left undone to save the life which was far dearer to her than her own.
As to the public aspects of the Queen’s married life, Count Vitzthum was favoured with many disclosures from the Duchess of Cambridge. “She spoke,” writes the Count, “with tears in her eyes, of the almost unparalleled happiness of his (the Prince Consort’s) twenty years of married life, now brought to such a sudden end. In all that clear and sunny sky there was only one cloud. How gladly would the Queen have shared her crown with the husband who helped her to wear it, and was her all in all! In vain already, in Sir Robert Peel’s time, had she expressed her wish to bestow the title of King upon her husband. The constitutional scruples of the deceased Tory Minister were urged still more emphatically by Lord Palmerston when, later on, the question was again mooted. The promotion of the Prince to the title of ‘Prince Consort’ was the consequence of a compromise. Prince Albert was naturalised in 1840, and obtained, in the same year, by letters patent, precedence next to the Queen. Nevertheless, he was not a British prince, and both at Court and the Privy Council his eldest son, on attaining his majority, must have taken precedence of him. ‘For the Prince of Wales,’ as the Duke of Cambridge says, ‘is and remains Prince of Wales.’”
“The value which the Queen attached to her husband’s precedence is explained by the submissive veneration she invariably showed him in great as well as small affairs. He was complete master in his house, and the active centre of an Empire whose power extends to every quarter of the globe. It was a gigantic task for a young German prince to think and act for all these millions of British subjects. All the threads were gathered together in his hands. For twenty-one years not a single despatch was ever sent from the Foreign Office which the Prince had not seen, studied, and, if necessary, altered. Not a single report of any importance from an Ambassador was allowed to be kept from him. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Secretary for War, the Home Secretary, the First Lord of the Admiralty—all handed to him every day just as large bundles of papers as did the Foreign Office. Everything was read, commented upon, and discussed. In addition to all this, the Prince kept up private correspondence with foreign Sovereigns, with British Ambassadors and Envoys, with the Governor-General of India, and with the Governors of the various colonies. No appointment in Church and State, in the Army or the Navy, was ever made without his approbation. At Court not the smallest thing was done without his order. No British Cabinet Minister has ever worked so hard during the Session of Parliament—and that is saying a good deal—as the Prince Consort did for twenty-one years. And the Ministers come and go; or at any rate, if frequently and long in office, as was the case with Palmerston and Russell, they have four or five months’ holiday every year. The Prince had no holidays at all. He was always in harness.
“The Continental notion that Royalty in England is a sinecure was signally refuted by the example of Prince Albert. As for the charge sometimes alleged against him, that owing to his Liberalism he yielded too much to the Ministers—in other words, to Parliament—it is wholly groundless. The influence exercised on the Government by the Crown is a power which makes itself felt, not merely in crises at home and abroad, but continually. This influence is, however, indirect, and wears a different garb in England to that which it assumes, for example, in Russia and France. Prince Albert’s task was all the more difficult, since his decision depended on unknown data, and he had to reckon with the changing factors of a constitution the foundations of which have been undermined for years by the rising waves of democracy. If, in spite of all this, the Crown’s game, as Prince Metternich expressed it, has been well played, this result is doubly creditable to the late Prince, inasmuch as he could only direct the game—not play it himself. With what tact and skill he did so is proved by the fact that, with the exception of the British Ministers and a few intimate friends, no one had any idea of the actual position of the Prince during his lifetime. Those who knew it were pledged to keep the secret, which now for the first time since his death has been revealed to the nation.
“As truth appears to have been the most prominent attribute of the Prince, this necessary game of concealment must have been all the more painful to him. The daily regard for public opinion gave rise to misunderstandings, to overcome which required an amount of elasticity which was bound gradually to weaken. Sparing as the deceased was of sleep, it is difficult to understand how he found time to grapple with the mass of business. He could never call an hour his own. The continual receptions, notwithstanding the uniformity of an almost cloister-like Court life, no less than the mere physical strain caused by the continual change of residence, cut up the day into pieces and left scarcely any time for rest and reflection. The wonder is how he found it possible, in the midst of these occupations, to attend with labouring conscientiousness to the cares of government; to conduct personally the education of nine children; to prosecute his studies in all branches of human knowledge; to astonish men with the results of these studies; and at the same time to live, as he did, for art, himself a student, and constant patron of music, painting, and poetry.”[118]
From these disclosures the following conclusions can now be drawn. The Prince Consort really killed himself by overwork. The Windsor fever, which was the proximate cause of his death, was neglected at the outset. Even when the symptoms were recognised as serious they were misunderstood and treated feebly by his physicians. Finally, when competent medical advice was sought, it was sought too late.
Of the Prince Consort’s character, much that is interesting and curious might be written. “The silent father of our kings to be” was respected rather than appreciated during his life by the nation he served so well. Save for the fact that he had no special aptitude for military science, we might have traced a curious parallelism between the work he did for England, and that which was done by William of Orange. Prince Albert’s strength, and perhaps his weakness, really lay in his capacity for looking at affairs from other than merely conventional British points of view. His serene intellect had scarcely any bias traceable to prejudice or vanity. His conclusions were always based on the application of a finely tempered logical mind, to all the facts of a given case that could be collected by patient and unceasing industry. A natural love of justice and truth informed his convictions. Instinctive
THE PRINCESS ALICE.
(From the Photograph by Mayall.)
sagacity and wise tolerance characterised his judgments. The good sense—which, according to Sainte-Beuve, gave form and substance to the ideas of Louis XIV.—never deserted Prince Albert in any crisis of his life. His policy was seldom at fault, because its sole aim was to conserve national as distinguished from dynastic interests. If he erred during the Crimean War he erred with some of the wisest men of his time. If he undervalued the promise and potency of the great movement which led to Italian independence, his mistake was excusable. It was wrapt up in the tortuous policy of Napoleon III. and Cavour, which was hateful to him just because it was tortuous, and, moreover, he dreaded any movement on the Continent which, by letting loose the ungovernable ambition of the Bonapartist dynasty and giving free play to the aggressive instincts of France, might again convert Belgium and Germany into “the cockpit of Europe.” Arnold has said of Sophocles, “He saw life steadily and saw it whole.” The Prince Consort was almost alone among his contemporaries by reason of his capacity to see organised society steadily and to see it whole. He was an omnivorous, desultory reader, and his education was fortunately neither academical nor technical, neither exclusively literary nor exclusively scientific. His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, and it was gratified under the guidance of a singularly correct taste. He was constantly corresponding with all sorts of interesting people, in all ranks of life, who happened to know anything that was worth knowing. Every business, or pursuit, or calling, that made men useful to each other, or added comfort, grace, beauty, and dignity to existence, had an irresistible fascination for him. A clever critic has said of Edmund Burke what might well be said of Prince Albert, whose mind, though less imaginative was more reflective. “Burke’s imagination,” writes Mr. Augustine Birrell, “led him to look out over the whole land: the legislator devising new laws; the judge expounding and enforcing old ones; the merchant despatching his goods and extending his credit; the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant; the frugal man slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age; the ancient institutions of Church and University, with their seemly provisions for sound learning and pure religion; the parson in his pulpit; the poet pondering his rhymes; the farmer eyeing his crops; the painter covering his canvases; the player educating the feelings.”[119] Similarly, when Prince Albert thought of England or her interests, her aims, and her mission in the world, it was not the England of St. James’s or St. Giles’s, of Piccadilly or the slums, or of any special class or order, that presented itself to his mind. It was the England which the eye of the historian will see—the England which has been built up and is maintained by the toil, the self-sacrifice, the enterprise, the leadership, and the genius of all who in their several stations work for her with brain and hand. To give these workers peace and security—that was to the Prince Consort the fundamental problem of statecraft, and the only true touchstone of policies. His finger was always on the pulse of the nation, and to every change in its feverish throbbing he was as sensitive as a physician. His “catholicity of gaze” has done for his writings and his speeches, what originality of thought and brilliancy of style have done for those of other men. It has enabled them to stand the test of time. If he failed to win unbounded popularity during his lifetime, it was because, as the French say, he had the defects of his qualities. His lot was not with the idlers of the earth, and he had little in common either with an aristocracy of pleasure or a democracy of noisy but futile activities. “Society,” says Dr. Martineau, “has reason for dismay where there is an ever-widening chasm between the two summit levels of thought and character.” The Prince Consort’s public life seemed as if it were planned in order to bridge this chasm. As for his private life, it is perhaps enough to say that the veneration and love with which his family, his friends, and his servants regarded him sufficiently attest its unblemished worth. Of the calumnies that pursued him almost to the verge of the grave, there is little to add to what has been already stated in preceding chapters. They never touched his honour as a gentleman, or his conduct as the head of an illustrious family. All the attacks which were directed against him were ostensibly directed against his supposed interference with affairs of State—in the interests of foreign despots. These attacks were, however, made by the Iagos of politics, from mixed motives of malignity and self-interest. As the late Mr. Albany Fonblanque once remarked, they came from those who had distinguished themselves by their unfailing championship of every form of despotism, and by their inveterate hatred of liberty “in every province of politics, and in every part of the world.”[120] Calumny from such quarters never needed any explanation, and the Prince met it, not with a defence, but with disdain.
It was on the 23rd of December that the Prince Consort’s remains were removed from Windsor Castle, and temporarily deposited in the entrance to the Royal Vault in St. George’s Chapel, where they were to lie until the completion and consecration of a mausoleum for their reception. Shortly before noon the gloomy pageant began to file through the gate of the Norman Tower. It was headed by mourning coaches, containing four of the Prince’s old servants, followed by an array of coaches with officials of his suite and household. One of the Queen’s carriages preceded the hearse. In it was Lord Spencer, who, as the Prince’s Groom of the Stole, carried his “crown.” His bâton, sword, and hat were borne by Lieut.-Colonel Lord George Lennox, the Prince’s Lord of the Bedchamber. The hearse, decorated in quiet, good taste with the Prince’s escutcheons, was escorted by the Second Life Guards, followed by the Queen’s carriage, the carriages of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, and the Duchess of Cambridge. The line of route was kept by the Second Life Guards and Scots Fusiliers with arms reversed. Long ere the procession reached St. George’s Chapel, the choir was filled by those who were invited to the ceremony, but not to join in procession, and the Knights of the Garter were in their stalls. The Royal Family met in the chapter-room at noon, from which, when the funeral procession was re-formed, on the arrival of the corpse at the South Park, they were conducted to their places by the Lord Chamberlain. As before, the servants and dependents of the Prince headed the procession. They were followed by servants and officers of the Royal household, in order of rank, the bâton, sword, hat, and crown