Books: Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1.

S >> Sarah Tytler >> Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26

This was the year (1820) of the greatest eclipse of the sun which had been
seen for more than a century, when Venus and Mars were both visible, with
the naked eye, for a few minutes in the middle of the day. Whatever the
portents in the sky might mean, the signs on the earth were not
reassuring. When the Bourbon monarchy had seemed fairly restored in
France, all the world was shocked by the assassination of the Duc de Berri
at the door of the Opera-house in Paris. Three kingdoms which had but
recently been delivered from the clutch of the usurper were in revolt
against the constituted authorities--Portugal, Spain, and Naples. Of
these, the two former were on the brink of wars of succession, when the
royal uncles, Don Miguel and Don Carlos, fought against their royal
nieces, Donna Maria and Donna Isabella. At home the summer had been a sad
one to the royal family and the country. The ferment of discontent was
kept up by the very measures--executions and imprisonments--taken to
repress anarchy, and by the continuance of crushed trade, want of work,
and high prices. The Duchess of York died, making the third member of the
royal family dead since the new year; yet she, poor lady, was but a unit
in the sum, a single foreign princess who, however, kind she might have
been to the few who came near her, was nothing to the mass of the people.

The name of another foreign princess was in every man's mind and on every
man's tongue. However, there were many reasons for the anomaly. Caroline
of Brunswick was the Queen until she should be proved unworthy to bear the
title. Her quarrel with the King had long made her notorious. Though the
story reflected little credit on her, it was so utterly discreditable to
him that it raised up friends for her where they might have been least
expected. His unpopularity rendered her popular. Her name became the
rallying-cry for a great political faction. The mob, with its usual
headlong, unreasoning appropriation of a cause and a person, elevated her
into a heroine, cheered frantically, and was ready to commit any outbreak
in her honour.

After six years' absence from England Queen Caroline had come back on the
death of George III. to demand her rights. She had landed at Dover and
been welcomed by applauding crowds. She had been escorted through Kent by
uproarious partisans, who removed the horses from her carriage and dragged
her in triumph through the towns. London, in its middle and lower classes,
had poured out to meet her and come back in her train, till she was safely
lodged in South Audley Street, in the house of her champion, Alderman Wood.

The King had instructed his ministers to lay before the House of Lords a
bill of Pains and Penalties against the Queen which, if sustained, would
deprive her of every claim to share his rank and would annul the marriage.
The Queen was prepared with her defence, and furnished with two of the
ablest advocates in the kingdom, Mr. Brougham and Mr. Denman. In the
earlier stages of the proceedings she was present almost every day in the
House of Lords. She entered in her puce or black sarcenet pelisse and
black velvet hat, a large, not uncomely woman, a little over fifty, and
took the chair of State provided for her, the House rising to receive the
Queen whom it was trying. The trial, in its miserable details of gross
folly well-nigh incredible, lasted from July to November--four months of
burning excitement--when it collapsed from the smallness of the majority
(nine) that voted for the second reading of the bill. The animus of the
prosecution and the unworthy means taken to accomplish its purpose,
defeated the end in view. It is said that had it been otherwise the
country would have broken out into widespread insurrection.

The Queen's supporters, of all classes, sects, and shades, indulged in a
perfect frenzy of rejoicing. Festivals, illuminations, every token of
triumph for her and condemnation for him accompanied what was equivalent
to her acquittal. She went in something like State, with her queer, motley
household--Bohemian, English and Italians--and her great ally, Alderman
Wood, to offer up thanksgiving in St. Paul's, where, at the same time, she
found her name omitted from the Church service. She wore white velvet and
ermine, and was surrounded by thousands of shouting followers, as if she
had been the most discreet of queens and best of women. The poor
passionate, wayward nature, which after all had been cruelly dealt with,
was touched as well as elated.

On the very day after Queen Caroline's arrival in London in June, she had
dispatched Alderman Wood to Kensington, to condole with the Duchess of
Kent on her recent widowhood, and inquire after the health of the infant
princess. The message was innocent in itself, but alarming by implication;
for Queen Caroline was not a woman to be kept at a distance, or to
hesitate in expressing her sentiments if she fancied her overtures
slighted by the embarrassed Duchess. In the month of August Queen Caroline
had established herself at Brandenburg House--the Margravine of Anspach's
house, by the river at Hammersmith--near enough to Kensington Palace, to
judge from human nature, to disconcert and provoke a smile against the
smiler's will--for Caroline's extravagances would have disturbed the
gravity of a judge--in the womanly Princess at the head of the little
household soberly settled there. Never were princesses and women more
unlike than Caroline of Brunswick and Victoria of Coburg; But poor Queen
Caroline was not destined to remain long an awkward enigma--a queen and
yet no queen, an aunt and yet no aunt, a scandal and a torment in
everybody's path.

In the summer of the following year, when the country was drawn away and
dazzled by the magnificent ceremonial of the coronation of George IV., she
exercised her last disturbing influence. She demanded to be crowned along
with her husband; but her demand was refused by the Privy Council. She
appeared at the door of Westminster Abbey, but the way was barred to her.
A fortnight afterwards, when King George had gone to Ireland to arouse the
nation's loyalty, his wife had passed where Privy Council ushers and
yeomen of the guard were powerless, where the enmity of man had no voice
in the judgment of God. She had been attacked by severe illness, and in
the course of five days she died, in the middle of a wild storm of
thunder, wind, and rain. The night before, a boatful of Methodists had
rowed up the Thames, within sound of the open windows of her sick-room,
and sung hymns to comfort her in her extremity. The heart of a large part
of the nation still clung to her because of her misfortunes and the
insults heaped upon her. The late Queen's body was conveyed back to
Brunswick. The funeral passed through Kensington, escorted by a mighty
mob, in addition to companies of soldiers. The last were instructed to
conduct the _cortege_ by the outskirts of London to Harwich, where a
frigate and two sloops of war were waiting for the coffin. The mob were
resolute that their Queen's funeral should pass through the city. The
first struggle between the crowd and the military took place at the corner
of Church Street, Kensington. The strange, unseemly, contention was
renewed farther on more than once; but as bloodshed had been forbidden,
the people had their way, and the swaying mass surged in grim
determination straight towards the Strand and Temple Bar. The captain of
the frigate into whose keeping the coffin was committed in order to be
conveyed back to Brunswick had been, by a curious, sorrowful coincidence,
the midshipman who, "more than a quarter of a century before, handed the
rope to the royal bride whereby to help her on board the _Jupiter_,"
which was to bring her to England.

One can fancy that, when that sorry tragedy was ended, and its perpetual
noisy ebullitions had sunk into silence, a sense of relief stole over the
palace-home at Kensington.

Round the childhood and youth of sovereigns, especially popular
sovereigns, a growth of stories will gather like the myths which attend on
the infancy of a nation. Such stories or myths are chiefly valuable as
showing the later tendency of the individual or people, the character and
history of the monarch or of the subjects, in accordance with which, in
reversal of the adage that makes the child father to the man, the man is,
in a new sense, father to the child, by stamping on his infancy and nonage
traits borrowed from his mature years. Mingled with the species of
legendary lore attaching to every generation, there is a foundation more
or less of authentic annals. It is as affording an example of this human
patchwork of fancy and fact, and as illustrating the impression deeply
engraved on the popular mind, that the following incidents of the Queen's
childhood and youth are given.

First, the people have loved to dwell on the close union between mother
and child. The Duchess nursed her baby--would see it washed and dressed.
As soon as the little creature could sit alone, her small table was placed
by her mother's at meals, though the child was only allowed the food fit
for her years. The Princess slept in her mother's room all through her
childhood and girlhood. In the entries in the Queen's diary at the time of
the Duchess of Kent's death, her Majesty refers to an old repeater
striking every quarter of an hour in the sick-room on the last night of
the Duchess's life--"a large watch in a tortoiseshell case, which had
belonged to my poor father, the sound of which brought back to me all the
recollections of my childhood, for I had always used to hear it at night,
but had not heard it for now twenty-three years."

When the Princess was a little older, and lessons and play alternated with
each other, she was taught to attend to the thing in hand, and finish what
she had begun, both in her studies and games. One day she was amusing
herself making a little haycock when some other mimic occupation caught
her volatile fancy, and she flung down her small rake ready to rush off to
the fresh attraction. "No, no, Princess; you must always complete what you
have commenced," said her governess, and the small haymaker had to
conclude her haymaking before she was at liberty to follow another
pursuit.

From the Princess's fifth year Dr. Davys, afterwards Bishop of
Peterborough, was her tutor. When it became clear that the little girl
would, if she lived, be Queen of England, a prelate high in the Church was
proposed to the Duchess of Kent as the successor of Dr. Davys in his
office. But the Duchess, with the mild firmness and conscientious fidelity
which ruled her conduct, declared that as she was perfectly satisfied with
the tutor who had originally been appointed (when the appointment was less
calculated to offer temptations to personal ambition and political
intrigue), she did not see that any change was advisable. If a clergyman
of higher rank was necessary, there was room for the promotion of Dr.
Davys. Accordingly he was named Dean of Chester.

The Baroness Lehzen was another of the Queen's earliest guardians who
remained at her post throughout her Majesty's youth. Louise Lehzen,
daughter of a Hanoverian clergyman, came to England as governess to
Princess Feodora Leiningen and remained as governess to Princess Victoria,
entering on her duties in 1824. In 1827 she was raised to the rank of a
Hanoverian Baroness, by George IV., at the request of Princess Sophia.
From that time Baroness Lehzen acted also as lady in attendance. On her
death, so late as 1870, her old pupil recorded of her, in a passage in the
Queen's journal, which is given in the "Life of the Prince Consort," "My
dearest, kindest friend, old Lehzen, expired on the 9th quite gently and
peaceably.... She knew me from six months old, and from my fifth to my
eighteenth year devoted all her care and energies to me with the most
wonderful abnegation of self, never even taking one day's holiday. I
adored, though I was greatly in awe of her. She really seemed to have no
thought but for me.... She was in her eighty-seventh year." This constancy
and permanency in the family relations were in themselves inestimable
boons to the child, who thus grew up in an atmosphere of familiar
affection and unshaken trust, for the absence of which nothing in the
world could have compensated. Another lady of higher rank was of necessity
appointed governess to the Queen in 1831, when she became next heir to the
throne. This lady, the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, appears also as
the Queen's friend in after life.

The late Bishop Wilberforce was told by Dr. Davys an interesting anecdote
of his former pupil. "The Queen always had from my first knowing her a
most striking regard to truth. I remember when I had been teaching her one
day, she was very impatient for the lesson to be over--once or twice
rather refractory. The Duchess of Kent came in, and asked how she had
behaved. Lehzen said, 'Oh, once she was rather troublesome.' The Princess
touched her and said, 'No, Lehzen, twice, don't you remember?' The Duchess
of Kent, too, was a woman of great truth."

It had been judged meet that the future Queen should not be made aware of
her coming greatness, which, for that matter, continued doubtful in her
earlier years. She was to grow up free from the impending care and
responsibility, happy and healthful in her unconscious girlhood--above
all, unassailed by the pernicious attempts to bespeak her favour, the
crafty flattery, the undermining insinuations which have proved the bane
of the youth of so many sovereigns. In order to preserve this reticence,
unslumbering care and many precautions were absolutely necessary. It is
said the Princess was constantly under the eye either of the Duchess of
Kent or the Baroness Lehzen. The guard proved sufficient; yet it was
difficult to evade the lively intelligence of an observant sensible child.

"Why do all the gentlemen take off their hats to me and not to my sister
Feodora?" the little girl is said to have asked wonderingly on her return
from a drive in the park, referring to her elder half-sister, who became
Princess of Hohenlohe, between whom and the questioner there always
existed the strong sweet affection of true sisters. Perhaps the little
lady felt indignant as well as mystified at the strange preference thus
given to her, in spite of her sister's superiority in age and wisdom. We
do not know what reply was made to this puzzling inquiry, though it would
have been easy enough to say that the little Princess was the daughter of
an English royal Duke, therefore an English Princess, and the big Princess
was German on both sides of the house, while these were English gentlemen
who had saluted their young countrywoman. We all know from the best
authority that Sir Walter Scott was wrong when he fancied some bird of the
air must have conveyed the important secret to the little fair-haired
maiden to whom he was presented in 1828. The mystery was not disclosed for
years to come.

The child, though brought up in retirement, was by no means secluded from
observation, or deprived of the change and variety so advantageous to
human growth and development. From her babyhood in the sad visit to
Sidmouth in 1820, and from 1821, when she was at that pretentious
combination of fantasticalness and gorgeousness, the Pavilion, Brighton,
she was carried every year, like any other well-cared-for child, either to
the seaside or to some other invigorating region, so that she became
betimes acquainted with different aspects of sea and shore in her island.
Ramsgate was a favourite resort of the Duchess's. The little Thanet
watering-place, with its white chalk cliffs, its inland basin of a
harbour, its upper and lower town, connected by "Jacob's Ladder," its pure
air and sparkling water, with only a tiny fringe of bathing-machines, was
in its blooming time of fresh rural peace and beauty when it was the
cradle by the sea of the little Princess.

When she was five she was at Claremont, making music and motion in the
quiet house with her gleeful laughter and pattering feet, so happy in
being with her uncle that she could look back on this visit as the
brightest of her early holidays. "This place," the Queen wrote to the King
of the Belgians long afterwards, "has a peculiar charm for us both, and to
me it brings back recollections of the happiest days of my otherwise dull
childhood,--when I experienced such kindness from you, dearest uncle,
kindness which has ever since continued.... Victoria plays with my old
bricks, and I see her running and jumping in the flower-garden, as
_old_, though I feel still _little_, Victoria of former days
used to do." In the autumn of 1825 the Queen's grandmother, the Dowager
Duchess of Coburg, visited England, and the whole family were together at
Claremont.

In 1826, "the warm summer," when the Princess was seven years of age, she
was invited to Windsor to see another uncle, George IV. That was a more
formidable ordeal, but her innocent frank brightness carried her through
it successfully. It is not easy for many men to contemplate with
satisfaction their heirs, when those heirs are no offspring of theirs. It
must have been doubly difficult for the King to welcome the little girl
who had replaced his daughter, the child of his wronged brother and of a
Princess whom King George persistently slighted and deprived of her due.
But we are told his Majesty was delighted with his little niece's
liveliness and intelligence.

In the following year, 1827, the Duke of York died, and the Princess, was
a step nearer to the throne, but she did not know it. So far from being
reared in an atmosphere of self-indulgence, the invaluable lesson was
early taught to her that if she were to be honourable and independent in
any rank, she must not buy what she could not pay for; if she were to be a
good woman she must learn to deny herself. An incident in illustration,
which made a small stir in its locality at the time, is often quoted. The
Duchess and her daughter were at Tunbridge Wells, dwelling in the
neighbourhood of Sir Philip Sidney's Penshurst, retracing the vanished
glories of the Pantiles, and conferring on the old pump-woman the
never-to-be-forgotten honour of being permitted to present a glass of
water from the marble basin to the Princess. The little girl made
purchases at the bazaar, buying presents, like any other young visitor,
for her absent friends, when she found her money all spent, and at the
same time saw a box which would suit an absent cousin. "The shop-people of
course placed the box with the other purchases, but the little lady's
governess admonished them by saying, 'No. You see the Princess has not got
the money; therefore, of course, she cannot buy the box.'" This being
perceived, the next offer was to lay by the box till it could be
purchased, and the answer was, "Oh, well, if you will be so good as to do
that." On quarter-day, before seven in the morning, the Princess appeared
on her donkey to claim her purchase.

In the reverence, peace, and love of her pure, refined, if saddened home,
everything went well with Princess Victoria, of whom we can only tell that
we know the old brick palace where she dwelt, the playground that was
hers, the walks she must have taken. We have sat in the later chapel where
she said her prayers, a little consecrated room with high pews shutting in
the worshippers, a royal gallery, open this time, and an elderly gentleman
speaking with a measured, melodious voice. We can guess with tolerable
certainty what was the Princess's child-world of books, though from the
circumstance that in the light of the future she was made to learn more
than was usual then for English girls of the highest rank, she had less
time than her companions for reading books which were not study, but the
most charming blending of instruction and amusement. That was still the
age of Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth. "Evenings at Home," "Harry and
Lucy," and "Frank and Rosamond," were in every well-conducted school-room.
All little girls read with prickings of tender consciences about the lady
with the bent bonnet and the scar on her hand, and came under the
fascination of the "Purple Jar." A few years later, Harriet Martineau's
bristling independence did not prevent her from feeling gratified by the
persuasion that the young Princess was reading through her tales on
political economy, and that Princess Victoria's favourite character was
Ella of the far north.

In the Princess's Roman history one day she came to the passage where the
noble matron, Cornelia, in answer to a question as to her precious things,
pointed to her sons, and declared, "These are my jewels." "Why," cried the
ready-witted little pupil, with a twinkle in her blue eyes, "they must
have been cornelians."

When the Princess's lessons took the form of later English history, she
was on the very spot for the study. Did her teacher tell her, we wonder,
the pretty story of "Bucky," who interrupted grave, saturnine King William
at his statescraft in one of yonder rooms? How the small dauntless
applicant wiled his father's master, great Louis's rival, into playing at
horses in the corridor? Or that sadder story of another less fortunate
boy, poor heavy-headed William of Gloucester? Tutors crammed and doctors
shook him up, with the best intentions, in vain. In his happier moments he
drilled his regiment of little soldiers on that Palace Green before his
uncle, King William.

Was the childish passion for exploring old garrets and lumber-rooms
excited in this royal little woman by the narrative of the wonderful
discovery which Queen Caroline had made in a forgotten bureau in this very
palace? Did the little Princess roam about too, in her privileged moments,
with a grand vision of finding more and greater art-treasures, other
drawings by Holbein or Vandyke, fresh cartoons by Raphael?

All the more valuable paintings had been removed long ago to Windsor, but
many curious pictures still remained on the walls of presence chambers and
galleries, kings' and queens' great dining-rooms and drawing-rooms,
staircases and closets. Did the pictures serve as illustrations to the
history lessons? Was the inspection made the recreation of rainy days,
when the great suites of State-rooms in which Courts were no longer held
or banquets celebrated, but which still echoed with the remembered tread
of kings' and courtiers' feet, must have appeared doubly deserted and
forlorn?

What was known as the King's Great Drawing-room was not far from the
Duchess of Kent's rooms, and was, in fact, put at her disposal in its
dismantled, ghostly condition. Among its pictures--freely attributed to
many schools and masters--including several battle-pieces and many
portraits, there were three representations of English palaces: old
Greenwich, where Elizabeth was born; old Hampton, dear to William and
Mary; and Windsor, the Windsor of George III. and Queen Charlotte, the
Princess's grandfather and grandmother. In the next room, amidst classic
and scriptural subjects, and endless examples of "ladies with ruffs,"
"heads in turbans," &c., there were occasionally family portraits--the old
King and Queen more than once; William, Duke of Gloucester; the Queen of
Wurtemberg as the girl-Princess Royal, with a dog. (She died in Wurtemberg
about this time, 1828. She had quitted England on her marriage in 1797,
and in the thirty-one years of her married life only once came back, as an
aging and ailing woman. She proved a good wife and stepmother.) A youthful
family group of an earlier generation was sure to attract a child--George
III. and his brother, Edward, Duke of York, when young, shooting at a
target, the Duke of Gloucester in petticoats, Princess Augusta (Duchess of
Brunswick, and mother of Caroline, Princess of Wales) nursing the Duke of
Cumberland, and Princess Louisa sitting in a chaise drawn by a favourite
dog, the scene in Kew Gardens, painted in 1746. Queen Elizabeth was there
as a child aged seven, A.D. 1540--three-quarters, with a feather-fan in
her hand. Did the guide of the little unconscious Princess pause
inadvertently, with a little catch of the breath, by words arrested on the
tip of the tongue, before that picture? And was he or she inevitably
arrested again before another picture of Queen Elizabeth in her prime,
returning from her palace, wearing her crown and holding the sceptre and
the globe; Juno, Pallas, and Venus flying before her, Juno dropping her
sceptre, Venus her roses, and the little boy Cupid flinging away his bow
and arrows, and clinging in discomfiture to his mother because good Queen
Bess had conquered all the three in power, wisdom, and beauty? We know the
Princess must have loved to look at the pictures. More curious than
beautiful as they were, they may have been sufficient to foster in her
that love of art which has been the delight of the Queen's maturer years.

English princesses, even though they were not queens in perspective, were
not so plentiful in Queen Victoria's young days as to leave any doubt of
their hands and hearts proving in great request when the proper time came.
Therefore there was no necessity to hold before the little girl, as an
incentive to good penmanship, the example of her excellent grandmother,
Queen Charlotte, who wrote so fair a letter, expressed with such
correctness and judiciousness, at the early age of fifteen, that when the
said letter fell, by an extraordinary train of circumstances, into the
hands of young King George, he determined there and then to make that
painstaking and sensible Princess, and no other, a happy wife and great
Queen. There was no strict need for the story, and yet as a gentle
stimulant it may have been administered.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26