Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria/Chapter 11

by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Chapter XI.

Forty-three to Forty-eight.

The Queen's first visit to a foreign country took place in September, 1843, when she and the Prince visited Louis Philippe and his family at Château d'Eu, near Tréport. It was not only the Queen's first visit to France, but the first time since the Field of the Cloth of Gold that an English reigning sovereign had been in France; and even then the meeting of the two Sovereigns had taken place on English territory near Calais. The Queen was enchanted with everything she saw. She had to the full all the keen and vivid interest which is almost invariably awakened by seeing for the first time all those innumerable little differences in every-day things which make a first foreign visit such a revelation. If she was delighted with France, she was no less so with her hosts, the King of the French and his family. She had been for six years Queen of England, and it was, perhaps, a refreshment to her to associate with those who were not her subjects, but her equals. She wrote in her journal, "I feel so gay and happy with these dear people." Louis Philippe, on his part, was extremely anxious to make her visit agreeable to her. He highly appreciated the honor she was conferring on him. The representatives of the ancient monarchies of Europe did not view him with any cordiality. He was not king by divine right, but buy the choice of the French people; the rightful King of France, in the view of the Emperors of Russia and Austria, was the exiled Comte de Chambord, Henry V. as they called him. Hence Louis Philippe cordially welcomed the social prestige which he gained by receiving a visit from the Queen of England. The King expressed his obligations on this score to Prince Albert over and over again.

The Earl of Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary of the day, accompanied the Queen and Prince to France. The English Foreign Office at this time regarded with apprehension a scheme which they believed Louis Philippe and his Minister, Guizot, had in view of strengthening French interests in Spain by marrying one of the King's sons to the young Queen Isabella. Louis Philippe, on the occasion of the Queen's visit, assured her most positively, and Guizot said the same thing to Aberdeen, that he had no wish or intention of the kind, that even if his son were asked in marriage for the Queen of Spain, he would not consent. The Queen of Spain and her sister the Infanta were then young girls of thirteen and twelve respectively. The French King's assurances to our Queen went so far as a positive promise that even if one of his sons should eventually marry the Infanta, he should not consent to the union until after the Queen of Spain was married and had children. It is necessary to go at length into the wretched story. Louis Philippe and Guizot covered themselves with infamy. Through their influence a hateful marriage was forced on Queen Isabella, her consent to it being, it is said, wrung from her under the influence of intoxication; from this marriage it was hoped and believed that no children would be born. At the same time that this so-called marriage was announced, it was also made public that the Infanta would be married to the Duc de Montpensier, son of Louis Philippe. The two marriages took place on the same day, October 10th, 1846. Well might Stockmar write of this odious transaction, as "a political intrigue which exceeds in immorality and vulgarity everything brought out in modern times on the theatre of politics; a part which would have shut out any one who had attempted to play it in the circle of private life from all respectable society."

Our Queen was deeply incensed; her whole soul revolted from the wickedness of the scheme, and she had the added bitterness of feeling that Louis Philippe had been guilty of personal deception towards herself. It was he who introduced the subject when she visited him at Eu, and gave her assurances upon it, unsought by her, and lightly broken by him. His way of announcing the project to her did not mend matters. He was ashamed to broach the subject in a formal manner, and he got his wife to tell the Queen as a detail of family news in a private and friendly letter, speaking of it as if it were of no political importance, but simply an event that would add to the domestic happiness ("le seul vrai dans ce monde," the poor Queen Marie Amélie was made to say) of the French Royal Family. Our Queen's reply was exceeding dignified, severe, short, and self-restrained. It left no doubt as to her sentiments; and nothing is more indicative of Louis Philippe's bad conscience in the matter than the fact, which he himself admits, that he sat up till four in the morning on three following nights composing a reply in which he endeavored in vain to justify himself.^[1]

It is of course quite open to doubt whether the English Foreign Office had been justified in regarding with apprehension the possible accession of a grandson of Louis Philippe to the troublous royalty of Spain. Cobden and the school he represented in England did not think it mattered a straw to England, from the political point of view, whom the Queen of Spain married. But the transaction could not be looked at as merely political. It was condemned throughout the length and breadth of England as grossly immoral, and the disgust it occasioned was all the greater on account of the pretensions to high motives and to religious principles assumed by the French King and his Minister.

Events soon confirmed the views of the Queen and Prince, so often inculcated by Stockmar, that sorrow will always be found dogging sin. The Spanish marriages took place in October, 1846; in fifteen months from that time Louis Philippe and the dynasty he hoped to found had been swept away; the little Spanish daughter-in-law whose son he had hoped might wear the crown of Spain was, with other members of his family, fugitive in England, indebted for shelter and even clothing to our Queen, who forgot all her resentment, and gave them a most kind welcome. Nothing came about as Louis Philippe had planned. The Queen of Spain had children; her grandson is now the baby King of Spain, and Louis Philippe's great-grandson, exiled from France, is addressing futile^[2] proclamations from English soil, to assure the French people that when they want him, which they show no sign of doing, he is ready to ascend the throne of his ancestors. It has been remarked that a strange fatality attended on many of the chief actors in the Spanish marriages. The French Minister at Madrid, M. Bresson, committed suicide in 1847. Louis Philippe and his dynasty were overthrown in 1848. Queen Isabella was deposed in 1868. Her son, Alfonso XII., married his cousin Princess Mercedes Montpensier. She died, not without suspicions of poisoning, within a year of her marriage; and he died, while still quite a young man, before the birth of his only son by his second marriage. Before the accession of Alfonso XII., the question of a successor to Queen Isabella was the proximate cause of the French and German War of 1870-71.

Cobden, travelling in France very shortly before the outbreak of 1848, saw nothing which led him to expect any political disturbance; he believed the future to promise nothing but tranquillity and commercial development, and that Free Trade spelt "peace on earth."

Stockmar was a Free Trader too, but he had learnt that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. He did not look for spiritual results from purely material causes; and perhaps his vantage-ground on what he called the watch-tower of London, or even his position at the "hole in the stove" in Coburg, enabled him to gauge more correctly than Cobden the political forces of the time. He had foreseen the outbreak of revolution, as the result to be expected from despotism and bad government on the Continent, added to the misery and destitution of the great masses of the people. The storm of 1848 did not find him unprepared; and in England and Belgium, where the principles of constitutionalism, as understood and taught by him, had taken firm hold, were almost the only countries in Europe where revolution did not get the upper hand.

But although this was so, 1848 was a sufficiently serious time in England. In Ireland the misery of the people had amounted to actual famine, and notwithstanding everything that lavish expenditure and devoted services, both by public servants and private individuals, could do, hundreds of thousands perished from starvation or its attendant pestilence. In the Union of Skibbereen nearly the whole population, 11,000 persons, perished. The shopkeepers of the little Kerry town of Kenmare told the writer of these pages in 1870 that during the worst months of the famine in 1847 they seldom took down their shutters in the morning without finding one or two corpses in the street, poor things who had been living in the mountains and had just had strength to crawl down into Kenmare to die. And what was famine in Ireland was the bitter pinch of scarcity in England and Scotland. In February, 1847, wheat was 102 shillings a quarter; added to this there was a general sense of alarm and absence of security, bringing with it want of capital, want of employment, want of wages. There was hardly a house, rich or poor, that was not suffering loss; but while to the rich the loss meant giving up luxuries which only custom had made seem necessaries, to the poor it meant actual want and privation;^[3] when men are low and miserable, and feel they have nothing to lose, is the time when revolutionary propaganda works like wildfire among them. There was an avowedly revolutionary political party in Ireland, always ready to take advantage of any difficulty the Government might be in, foreign or domestic, in order to harass and thwart them. "Refuse us this" (repeal of the Union) O'Connell had said in 1840, when war with France hung in the balance about the Eastern Question, "and then in the day of your weakness dare to go to war with the most insignificant of the powers of Europe." In 1848, the mantle of O'Connell had fallen on John Mitchel, who, in his paper called The United Irishman, gave instructions for the successful carrying on of revolutionary street warfare; he recommended the covering of the streets with broken glass to lame the horses of the soldiery, and suggested that the citizens should provide themselves with missiles to throw from the houses; these, he said, could be used with great effect from the elevation of a top story, especially if forethought had been used to provide "boiling water or grease, or, better, cold vitriol if available. Molten lead is good, but too valuable; it should always be cast in bullets and allowed to cool." This and a great deal of similar rubbish was poured forth day by day, or week by week, in the rebel papers. It would be harmless enough in an ordinary way; but amid the excitements of 1848, and addressed to such an excitable people, it might have proved a spark in a powder magazine. Mr. Mitchel proclaimed his intention of committing high treason, but he was arrested before he had had an opportunity of doing so. A deputation of Irish revolutionists was sent to the Provisional Government in Paris to demand "what they were sure to obtain, the assistance of 50,000 troops for Ireland." The French Government absolutely declined the proposal, and said they were at peace with Great Britain, and wished to remain so. Mitchel was sentenced to transportation, and the heads of the deputation to Paris were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death. Their sentences were, however, commuted to transportation, and then the fate which so often throws a ludicrous aspect over Irish revolutionary affairs overtook them; they denied the right of the Crown to reduce the severity of their sentences, and demanded that they should either be set at liberty, or hanged, drawn, and quartered,—a request which it is needless to say was disregarded.

But Ireland was not the only source of anxiety; there was a threatening of riot and pillage in Scotland, and one very serious rising took place near Glasgow. It was suppressed through the personal and moral courage of the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Sir Archibald Alison; but if it had been successful the whole of the manufacturing district of the West of Scotland would probably have taken fire. In England danger appeared to threaten from the Chartist movement. The Chartists gave notice that they intended to assemble at Kennington Common 500,000 strong, on the 10th of April, 1848, and to march thence to the House of Commons, there to present their petition, which they said had received nearly 6,000,000 signatures. It is rather significant that Englishmen, even when they talk revolution, can, when it comes to action, think of nothing less constitutional than the presenting of a petition to Parliament. Sampson, the servant in Romeo and Juliet, is the typical English revolutionist. "Is the law on our side if I say—ay?" However, the Queen, the Ministry, and the whole country were alarmed. In London thousands of special constables voluntarily enrolled themselves, as a civil force, to help the military, if need were, to maintain to order. The Duke of Wellington, as Commander-in-Chief, directed special preparations for the defence of London; but with this usual good sense he took care that not a single extra soldier or piece of artillery was to be seen on the eventful day. The Admiralty, Horse Guards, and Treasury were strongly garrisoned and filled with arms; there were 800 men with cannon in Buckingham Palace, and steamers and gunboats lay in readiness on the river. Country gentlemen garrisoned their London houses with their gunkeepers armed with double-barrelled guns. As everybody knows now, it all ended in smoke. The 10th of April, 1848, came and went; the Chartists met at Kennington, not 500,000, but about 25,000 strong; their petition contained not six million, but about two million signatures, a very large proportion of which were fictitious. About 8,000 men from the mass meeting walked in procession towards Westminster. On being met on the bridge by a police force, and informed they would not be allowed to cross in mass, they bowed to the inevitable, and sent their petition to Parliament in three four-wheeled cabs! In this humble and unromantic manner ended the English revolution of '48. The whole movement was overwhelmed with ridicule, from which it never recovered, and the ordinary law-abiding people felt ashamed that they had allowed themselves ever to believe in its seriousness.

Constitutional government was stronger than it knew itself to be. It was easy to be wise after the event; but before, many brave hearts had failed them for fear. The Queen was, of course, specially affected by events on the Continent, as the monarchs whose rule was being either overturned or threatened were in many instances her relations and friends. She wrote on the 6th March to Stockmar, "I am quite well, indeed particularly so, though God knows we have had since the 25th enough for a whole life,—anxiety, sorrow, excitement." On the very day on which the Queen wrote, a mob had rushed to Buckingham Palace, breaking lamps and shouting, "Vive la République!" However, their leader, when arrested, began to cry! so that he could not be considered a dangerous revolutionist.

It was in the midst of all this excitement that Princess Louise was born, on March 18th, 1848. With all the fear caused by the anticipation of the Chartist movement on April 10th, it is not surprising that the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, strongly urged the removal of the Court to Osborne. It is not impossible that the three-weeks-old baby was even more persuasive than the Prime Minister. However this may be, the Queen left London for Osborne on April 8th, not without some criticism from Greville. Greville was nothing if not critical; he had blamed Sir Robert Peel for resigning in 1844, and thus causing a ministerial crisis when the Queen was near her confinement, and he now blamed Lord John Russell for advising the Queen to go to Osborne with her new-born infant, in anticipation of a Chartist riot in London on April 10, 1848.

There was an immense feeling of relief all over the country when the day passed off so quietly. The popular feeling in London was manifested by the cheers which greeted the Duke of Wellington when he turned out early the next morning to his post at the Horse Guards. The Prince wrote to his private secretary on April 11th, "What a glorious day was yesterday for England. … How mightily this will tell all over the world!" The utter inability of the revolutionary germ to thrive in the soil of constitutional liberty was the lesson of 1848. Repeated illustrations of the same fact have been given in more recent times. After the explosion in Greenwich Park in 1894, caused by the Frenchman Bourdin, the police seized an anarchist club near Tottenham Court Road, and caught a gang of eighty men representing the anarchist propaganda in London. Every man but one was a foreigner, and the solitary Englishman was a journalist who had come, not to revolutionize, but to get copy for his paper!

With characteristic conscientiousness the Queen and her husband did not rest content with the fact that the social peace of England was not endangered. They felt there never would have been even the anticipation of danger, unless there had been much in the condition of the poorer classes which called for redress. They had not been many days at Osborne before they sent for Lord Ashley (better known to this generation as Lord Shaftesbury), and asked his advice as to what could be done to render more happy the condition of the poor. This was a subject which, as is well known, was to Lord Ashley, not merely an occupation, but a passion. His whole life, from youth to old age, was given to it; almost his last words, at the age of 85, when he knew he was dying, were: "I cannot bear to leave the world, with all the misery in it." The Prince could not, therefore, have sent for a better counsellor. They had a long conversation in the gardens at Osborne. The Prince asked for advice, and how he could best assist towards the common weal. "Now, sir," replied Lord Ashley, "I have to ask your Royal Highness whether I am to speak out freely, or to observe Court form." "For God's sake," said the Prince, "speak out freely."

Lord Ashley then advised him to throw himself into movements to promote the social well-being of the masses of the people, and to show in public that he was doing so. On the Prince asking for more detail, Lord Ashley urged him to come and see for himself how the poorest people in London lived; to go into their houses, and he offered himself to conduct the Prince over houses in St. Giles, near Seven Dials. He also urged him to take the chair a month later at the meeting of the Laborers' Friend Society, and (with the little bit of worldly wisdom that guileless people so often pride themselves on) to come in semi-state, with several carriages, four horses, outriders and scarlet liveries. The Prince felt he ought not to consent to all this without asking Lord John Russell's advice; but he gave a conditional consent. Lord John, however, was hostile, and offered strong opposition to the Prince acting on Lord Ashley's advice. However, Lord Ashley stuck to his guns. He admitted that in any strictly political matter the Prince was bound to abide by the advice of the Prime Minister, but on a matter like this he advised the Prince to tell Lord John that "Your Royal Highness is as good a judge as he is." Lord Ashley finally prevailed, and the Prince took the chair at the Laborers' Friend meting on May 18th, 1848. The outriders and the scarlet liveries were not omitted, and the Prince made a speech which Sir Theodore Martin says first fairly showed the country what he was, and gave a very important impulse to the manifold movements towards social improvement which have been so marked a feature of the present reign. Thus out of the "nettle, danger," we were enabled "to pluck the flower, safety."

1. The poor excuse put forward by Louis Philippe was that the English Foreign Secretary, then Lord Palmerston, was manoeuvring to bring about a marriage between a Coburg Prince and the Queen of Spain. There was no foundation for this charge; but Louis Philippe seems to have had a terror of Lord Palmerston which deprived him of all self-control, and capacity for judging of evidence.
2. See Times, January 18th, 1895.
3. Greville anticipated that the troubles of the time would affect him to the extend of the loss of half his income. He did not whine, but said, though he should not like it, he hoped and believed he could accommodate himself to the necessary change in his habits without repining outwardly or inwardly.