[1765-1837 A.D.]

THE KING'S LIFE IN RETROSPECT

and

William Henry, the third son of George III, was born in August, 1765, was therefore in his seventy-second year at the time of his death. He was destined for the sea, and became a midshipman at the age of fourteen. It is amusing to read, at this distance of time, of the distresses of the admiralty at the insubordination to rules shown by Prince William, when he had risen high enough in the service to have a ship of his own to play his pranks with. When he was two or three and twenty, he twice left a foreign station without leave, thus setting an example which might ruin the discipline of the navy, if left unpunished. But how adequately to punish a prince of the blood was the perplexity of the admiralty. They ordered him to remain in harbour at Plymouth for as long a time as he had absented himself from his proper post, and then to return to his foreign station. This was not enough; but it was thought to be all that could be done in such a case; and the prince was withdrawn from the active exercise of his profession-from that time ascending through the gradations of naval rank as a mere matter of form. For twenty years he continued thus to rise in naval rank, besides being made duke of Clarence, with an allowance from parliament of £12,000 a year.

During those twenty years, when he should have been active in his profession, he was living idly on shore, endeavouring after that enjoyment of domestic life for which he was eminently fitted, and from which our princes are so cruelly debarred by the operation of the Royal Marriage Act. The duke of Clarence was the virtual husband of Mrs. Jordan, the most bewitching of actresses, and the queen of his heart during the best part of his life. They had ten children-five sons and five daughters. It is averred by those who understand the matter well that the conduct of the duke of Clarence in his unfortunate position was as good as the circumstances permitted-that he was as faithful and generous to Mrs. Jordan as some parties declared him to be otherwise. When men place themselves in such a position, they are bound to bear all its consequences without complaint; and it is understood that the duke of Clarence endured much complaint and undeserved imputation with a patience and silence which were truly respectable. His children, the Fitzclarence family, were received in society with a freedom very unusual in England under such circumstances, and certainly, the strict English people appeared to be pleased rather than offended that the affectionate-hearted prince, to whom no real liberty of marriage had been left, should be surrounded in his old age by children who repaid his affection by exemplary duty and care. If this was a spectacle unfit-by the very mixture of goodness in it— for the court of England, the harm that there was in it was ascribed to the position of royalty rather than the fault of the prince, while all believed that no reparation to the purity of society could be effectually made by depriving the old man of the comfort of his children's society. Some of the family had occasion to find that forbearance could go even further than this; for they were left unhurt, except by universal censure, after their improper and foolish exertion of domestic influences against the Reform Bill and the Grey administration.

After the death of the princess Charlotte, when many royal marriages took place, in competition for the succession, the duke of Clarence married the eldest daughter of the duke of Saxe Meiningen. No issue from this marriage survived, though two infants were born only to die. For a few months, as we have seen, the duke of Clarence bore the dignity of lord high admiral; and he

[1830-1837 A.D.]

had previously performed a few holiday services on the sea by escorting and conveying royal visitors and adventurers across the Channel, and up and down in it. In politics, he had through life shown the same changeableness as in his conduct on the throne. On scarcely any subject was he firm but in his opposition to the abolition of slavery. He had not mind enough to grasp a great principle and hold to it; and, as he had not the obstinacy of his father and elder brothers, he was necessarily infirm of purpose, and as difficult to deal with in state matters as any of his family. What the difficulty amounted to, the history of the reform movement shows. In other respects, there was no comparison between the comfort of intercourse with him and with the two preceding sovereigns. He was too harebrained to be relied on with regard to particular measures and opinions; but his benevolent concern for his people, his confiding courtesy to the ministers who were with him (whatever they might be), and his absence of self-regards, except where his timidity came into play, made him truly respectable and dear, in comparison with his predecessors. When his weakness was made conspicuous by incidents of the time, it seemed a pity that he should have been accidentally made a king: but then again some trait of benignity or patience or native humility would change the aspect of the case, and make it a subject of rejoicing that virtues of that class were seen upon the throne, to convince such of the people as might well doubt it that a king may have a heart, and that some of its overflow might be for them.

The funeral took place at night on the 8th of July, the duke of Sussex being chief mourner. For the last time, the royal crown of Hanover was placed beside the imperial crown on the coffin of a king of England.

Resplendent with glory, teeming with inhabitants, overflowing with riches, boundless in extent, the British Empire, at the accession of Queen Victoria, seemed the fairest and most powerful dominion upon earth. It had come victorious through the most terrible strife which ever divided mankind, and more than once, in the course of it, singly confronted Europe in arms. It had struck down the greatest conqueror of modern times. It still retained the largest part of the continent of North America, and a new continent in Australia had been recently added, without opposition, to its mighty domains. All the navies of the world had sought in vain to wrest from the hands of its sovereign the sceptre of the ocean; all the industry of man, to rival in competition the produce of its manufactures or the wealth of its merchants. It had given birth to steam navigation, which had bridged the Atlantic, and railways, which had more than halved distance. It had subdued realms which the Macedonian phalanx could not reach, and attained a dominion beyond what the Roman legions had conquered. An hundred and twenty millions of men, at the period of its highest prosperity, obeyed the sceptre of Alexander; as many in aftertimes were blessed by the rule of the Antonines; but an hundred and fifty millions peopled the realms of Queen Victoria; and the sun never set on her dominions, for before "his declining rays had ceased to illuminate the ramparts of Quebec, his ascending beams flamed on the minarets of Calcutta."-ALISON.b

THE death of William IV, on the 20th of June, 1837, placed on the throne of England a young princess, who was destined to reign for a longer period than any of her predecessors. The new queen, the only daughter of the duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, had just attained her majority. Educated in comparative seclusion, her character and her person were unfamiliar to her future subjects, who were a little weary of the extravagances and eccentricities of her immediate predecessors. Her accession gave them a new interest in the house of Hanover. And their loyalty, which would in any

[1819-1820 A.D.] case have been excited by the accession of a young and inexperienced girl to the throne of the greatest empire in the world, was stimulated by her conduct and appearance. She displayed from the first a dignity and good sense which won the affection of the multitude who merely saw her in public, and the confidence of the advisers who were admitted into her presence.c

Before we take up the political events of the new reign, we may well pause to learn something of the personality of the young sovereign who was to become in later years the most revered of monarchs. She was the only child of Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III, and was born in Kensington Palace, on the 24th of May, 1819. Her parents had been living at Amorbach, in Franconia, owing to the duke of Kent's straitened circumstances, but they returned to London on purpose that their child should be born in England; and the duke was so anxious for the safety of his wife that he himself drove the carriage over all the land part of the journey from Bavaria. The duchess of Kent was the princess Victoria Mary Louisa of Coburg, who had been married first to Prince Emich Karl of Leiningen, and by him had two children. The birth of the duke of Kent's baby was not considered at the time an event of much importance, for several lives and many possibilities stood between the infant and her chance of succeeding to the throne. George III was still alive-aged, blind, and insane-and two brothers of the prince regent older than the duke of Kent were living also. The first of these, the duke of York, was not likely to have children; but the duke of Clarence had been married on the same day as the duke of Kent to the princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, and he was to have two daughters, both of whom, however, died during infancy. The question as to what name the duke of Kent's child should bear was not settled without bickerings. The duke of Kent wished her to be christened Elizabeth, after England's greatest queen, but the czar Alexander I had promised to stand sponsor, and his ambassador in London, Prince Lieven, made great efforts to get the child named Alexandrina. On the other hand, the prince regent desired that his niece should be called Georgiana. In the end the regent yielded to the czar, but said that as the name of George could stand second to none, that of Georgiana should not be conferred at all. The baptism was performed in a drawing-room of Kensington Palace on 24th June by Dr. Manners Sutton, archbishop of Canterbury, who used the gold font which figures among the regalia in the Tower. The prince regent, who was present, named the child Alexandrina; then, being respectfully requested by the duke of Kent to give a second name, he said, rather abruptly, Let her be called Victoria, after her mother, but this name must come after the other," upon which the duke of York, as proxy for the emperor of Russia, made a low bow.

66

Six weeks after her christening the princess was vaccinated. This was the first occasion on which a member of the royal family underwent the operation, and it helped greatly to diminish the prejudice against Jenner's discovery among ignorant people. In January, 1820, the duke of Kent died, five days before his brother, the prince regent, succeeded to the throne as George IV. The widowed duchess of Kent was no longer in her first youth. She was a woman of thirty-four, handsome, homely, a German at heart, and with little liking for English ways. But she was a woman of experience and shrewd; and, fortunately, she had in her brother, Prince Leopold of Coburg, afterwards king of the Belgians, a safe and affectionate adviser. This prince had been the husband of the princess Charlotte of Wales, daughter of the regent and direct heir to the British crown, who died in 1817 with her new-born child, and this double bereavement had destroyed both his domestic happiness and

[1820-1837 A.D.]

his political expectations. In his sorrow he had never had the courage to look upon the face of his infant niece before her father's death, but from that day he took the child under his guardianship, lavishing as much devotion on her as if she had been his own daughter. The prince lived at Claremont, and this became the duchess of Kent's occasional home; but she was much addicted to travelling, and spent several months every year in visits to watering-places. It was said at court that she liked the demonstrative homage of crowds; but she had good reason to fear lest her child should be taken away from her to be educated according to the views of George IV. Between the king and his sister-in-law there was little love. The spirited duchess had never concealed her dislike for his majesty's character, or her contempt for his associates of both sexes, and she had also managed to make an enemy of the ill-natured duke of Cumberland, whom the king feared for his cutting tongue. The duke sought to embitter his brother's mind against the duchess of Kent, and when the death of the duke of Clarence's two children, in 1820 and 1821, had made it pretty certain that Princess Victoria would become queen, the duchess felt that the king might possibly obtain the support of his ministers if he insisted that the future sovereign should be brought up under masters and mistresses designated by himself.

In 1830 George IV died, and William IV having ascended the throne, the princess Victoria became his heir. A Regency bill was introduced into parliament by Lord Lyndhurst, chancellor in the duke of Wellington's administration, and it was judged that the princess ought now to be told of her proper place in the order of succession. One day the baroness Lehzen put a genealogical table into her pupil's English history. What followed is mentioned in Sir Theodore Martin's Life of the Prince Consort:

"The princess opened the book, and perceiving the additional paper, said, 'I never saw that before.' 'It was not thought necessary that you should, madam,' answered her governess. 'I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,' continued the princess, and after some moments resumed: 'Now, many a child would boast, but they don't know the difficulty. There is much splendour, but there is more responsibility.' The princess, having lifted up the forefinger of her right hand while she spoke, gave the baroness her little hand, repeating, 'I will be good. I understand now why you urged me so much to read even Latin. My aunts, Mary and Augusta, never did; but you told me Latin is the foundation of English grammar and of all elegant expressions, and I learned it as you wished it, but I understand all better now,' and the princess gave her hand, repeating, 'I will be good.' The governess then said, But your aunt Adelaide is still young and may have children, and, of course, they would ascend the throne after their father, William IV, and not you, princess.' The princess answered, 'And if it were so I should not be disappointed, for I know by the love Aunt Adelaide bears me how fond she is of children.""

Queen Adelaide was a very good woman. When the second of her children died she had written to the duchess of Kent, "My children are dead, but your child lives, and she is mine, too." Kind old William IV also cherished affectionate feelings towards his niece; unfortunately he took offence at the duchess of Kent for declining to let her child come and live at his court for several months in each year, and through the whole of his reign there was strife between the two; and Prince Leopold, who, after refusing the crown of Greece, had been induced to open a new career for himself as king of the Belgians, was no longer in England to act as peacemaker.

In May, 1837, the duchess received an address from the city of London,