Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria/Chapter 1

by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

VICTORIA.

CHAPTER I.

The Queen's Immediate Predecessors.

Every now and then, on the birth of a male heir to any of the great historic kingdoms of Europe, the newspapers and the makers of public speeches break forth into rejoicing and thanksgiving that the country in question is secured from all the perils and evils supposed to be associated with the reign of a female Sovereign. It is of little importance, perhaps, that this attitude of mind conveys but a poor compliment to our Queen and other living Queens and Queen Regents; but it is not a little curious that the popular opinion to which these articles and speeches give expression, namely, that the chances are that any man will make a better Sovereign than any woman, is wholly contrary to experience; it is hardly going too far to say that in every country in which the succession to the Crown has been open to women, some of the greatest, most capable, and most patriotic Sovereigns have been queens. The names of Isabella of Spain, of Maria Theresa of Austria, will rise in this connection to every mind; and, little as she is to be admired as a woman, Catherine II. of Russia showed that she thoroughly understood the art of reigning. Her vices would have excited little remark had she been a king instead of a queen. It is an unconscious tribute to the higher standard of conduct queens have taught the world to expect from them, that while the historic muse stands aghast at the private life of the Russian Empress, she is only very mildly scandalized by a Charles V. or a Henry IV., thinking, with much justice, that their great qualities as rulers serve to cover their multitude of sins as private individuals. The brief which history could produce on behalf of Queens, as successful rulers, can be argued also from the negative side. The Salic law did not, to say the least, save the French monarchy from ruin. How far the overthrow of that monarchy was due to a combination of incompetence and depravity in various proportions in the descendants of the Capets from the Regent Orleans onwards towards the Revolution, is a question which must be decided by others. Carlyle's view of the cause of the Revolution was that it was due to "every scoundrel that had lived, and, quack-like, pretended to be doing, and had only been eating and misdoing, in all provinces of life, as shoeblack or as sovereign lord, each in his degree, from the time of Charlemagne and earlier." Women no doubt produced their shares of quacks and charlatans in the humble ranks of this long procession of misdoers, but not as sovereigns, because, with the superior logic of the Gallic mind, the French people not only believed the accession of a woman to the throne to be a misfortune, but guarded themselves against the calamity by the Salic law. The fact affords a fresh proof that logic is a poor thing to be ruled by, because of the liability, which cannot be eliminated from human affairs, of making a mistake in the premises. The English plan, though less logical, is more practically successful. We speak and write as if a nation could not suffer a greater misfortune than to have a woman at the head of the State; but we do nothing to bar the female succession, with the result that out of our five Queens Regnant we have had three of eminent distinction as compared with any other Sovereign; and of these three, one ranks with the very greatest of the statesmen who deserve to be remembered as the Makers of England.

Something more can be claimed than that the Salic law did not prevent the overthrow of the French monarchy. It is probably that the female succession to the throne did save the English monarchy in 1837. Failing the Queen, the next heir would have been the Duke of Cumberland, and from all the records of the time, it does not suffice to say that he was unpopular, he was simply hated,—and with justice. He appears to have conceived it to be his function in Hanover "to cut the wings of the democracy;" if he had succeeded to the English throne and adopted the same policy here, he would have brought the whole fabric of the monarchy about his ears. He was equally without private and public virtues. The Duke of Wellington once asked George IV. why the Duke of Cumberland was so unpopular. The King replied, "Because there never was a father well with his son, or husband with his wife, or lover with his mistress, or friend with his friend, that he did not try to make mischief between them."

The political power which has in various countries devolved on queens calls to mind one thing that ought to be remembered in discussions upon the hereditary principle in government. Within its own prescribed limitations it applies the democratic maxim, la carrière ouverte aux talents, much more completely than any nominally democratic form of government, and thus has repeatedly given, in our own history, a chance to an able woman to prove that in statesmanship, courage, sense of responsibility, and devotion to duty, she is capable of ruling in such a way as to strengthen her empire and throne by carrying the devoted affection of all classes of her subjects.

Twice in the history of England have extraordinary efforts been made to avert the supposed misfortune of a female heir to the throne; and twice has the "divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," decreed that these efforts should be in vain, and the dreaded national misfortune has turned out to be a great national blessing. Mr. Froude tells us that five out of Henry VIII.'s six marriages were contracted in consequence of his patriotic desire to secure the succession to the throne in the male line. But when the feeble flame of Edward VI.'s life was extinguished, four women stood next in the succession, and England acquired at a most critical moment of her history, in the person of Elizabeth, perhaps the greatest Sovereign who has ever occupied the throne of this country.

The second occasion was after the death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817. George III., with his fifteen children, had not then a single heir in the second generation. It would not be correct to say that the Royal Dukes were then married by an Act of Parliament, no Act of Parliament was necessary; but political pressure was brought on them to marry, and Parliament granted them extra allowances of sums varying from ₤10,000 to ₤6,000 a year, and in May and June, 1818, the marriages took place of the Duke of Cambridge to the Princess Augusta of Hesse, of the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV.) to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, and of the Duke of Kent to Princess Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, widow of the Prince of Leiningen, and sister of Prince Leopold, the husband of Princess Charlotte. The marriage of the Duke of Kent is the only one of these that immediately concerns us. As the fourth son of George III., his children would, under ordinary circumstances, have had but a remote prospect of succeeding to the throne. But of his elder brothers, the Prince Regent had, in consequence of the death of Princess Charlotte, become childless, the Duke of York was also childless, the Duke of Clarence, whose marriage was contracted on the same day as that of the Duke of Kent, 13th June, 1818, took precedence of him as an elder brother, and if he had had legitimate heirs they would have succeeded to the throne. The Princess (afterwards Queen) Adelaide was not childless. She bore two children, but they died in their infancy; and thus the only child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the Princess Alexandrina Victoria, became heiress-presumptive of the English throne. The Duke of Kent took the strongest interest in his baby girl's chances of the succession. Before the birth of the child he urged upon his wife, who was then resident at Amorbach in Bavaria, that the possible future King or Queen of England ought to be born on English soil, and then she consented to remove to Kensington; it is said he was so keenly anxious for her safety that he drove her carriage the whole of the land journey between Amorbach and Kensington with his own hands. At the present day we should perhaps say that the chances of safety law with the professional rather than with the amateur coachman; but the Duke proved his efficiency in handling the reins, and brought his wife in safety to London, where, on the 24th May, 1819, the baby was born who is now Queen of England. It should be noted that the Duchess was attended in her confinement by a woman, following the custom of her own country in this matter, and that the same accoucheuse, Madam Charlotte Siebold, attended a few months later upon the Duchess of Coburg when she gave birth to the child who in after years became Prince Consort. There are several little anecdotes which illustrate the Duke of Kent's appreciation of the important place his little girl was born to fill. He wanted the baby to be called Elizabeth, because it was the name of the greatest of England's Queens, and therefore a popular name with the English people; there were, however, godfathers, Royal and Imperial, who overruled him as to the naming of the child. These were the Emperor of Russia (Alexander I.) and the Prince Regent, and it was therefore proposed to call the baby, Alexandrina Georgiana. But George, Prince Regent, objected to his name standing second to any other, however distinguished. His brother, on the other hand, insisted that Alexandrina should be the first of the baby's names. In consequence of this dispute the little Princess was so fortunate as to escape bearing the name of Georgiana at all; when she was handed to the Archbishop at the font the Prince Regent only gave the name of Alexandrina. The baby's father, however, intervened, and requested that another name might be added, with the result that, as a kind of afterthought, her mother's name was, as it were, thrown in, and the little Princess was christened Alexandrina Victoria. It was in this way that the name Victoria, then almost unknown in England, was given to the baby, and has since become familiar in our mouths as household words. The Duke declined to allow the congratulations that were showered on him at the birth of his child to be tempered by regrets that the daughter was not a son. In reply to a letter conceived in this vein from his chaplain, Dr. Prince, the Duke wrote at the same time that "I assure you how truly sensible I am of the kind and flattering intentions of those who are prompted to express a degree of disappointment from the circumstances of the child not proving to be a son instead of a duaghter. I feel it due to myself to declare that such sentiments are not in unison with my own, for I am decidedly of opinion that the decrees of Providence are at all times wisest and best." As this was addressed to a clergyman and a Doctor of Divinity, it may be inferred that Her Majesty's father was not without a sense of humor. Another story of the Duke is that, playing with his baby when she was a few months old, he held her high in his arms and said, "Look at her well, for she will be the Queen of England." It must be remembered, however, that at this time there was no certainty that the children of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence would not survive the perils of infancy; moreover, if the Duke of Kent had lived to have a son, the boy would have become the heir in preference to his sister. The Duke's strongly marked feeling of fatherly pride and affection is almost the only trait in his character by which we are able at this distance of time to conjure him up out of the mists of bygone years.^[1] This feeling was soon to receive a melancholy illustration. The Duke and Duchess, with their baby daughter, removed from Kensington to Sidmouth to spend the winter of 1819-20. Returning home on a January day, with boots wet with snow, the Due caught a severe chill from playing with his baby, instead of changing his boots.^[2] The illness developed into acute pneumonia, of which he died in January, 1820, leaving his wife a stranger in a strange land, hardly able to speak the English language, sole guardian of England's future Queen. The Duchess of Kent must have been a woman of considerable strength of character and power of will. She was in an extremely lonely and difficult position. Pecuniarily, her chief legacy from her husband consisted of his debts, which the allowance made then by Parliament was not sufficiently ample to enable her to pay.

Her brother, then Prince Leopold, widower of Princess Charlotte, and afterwards King of the Belgians, supplemented her income from his own purse. The Duchess and her children (she had two by her first marriage) were frequently his guests at Claremont and elsewhere, and the Queen speaks of these visits as the happiest periods of her childhood. After a few years the death of the children of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence made it practically certain that the Princess Victoria would become Queen. The Court of George IV. was not one which the Duchess of Kent could frequent with any satisfaction; she was on bad terms with him, and he often threatened to take her child away from her. His character made him quite capable of doing this; he was equally heartless and despotic. Matters were not greatly improved as to personal relations between the Sovereign and herself when William IV. became King; the Princess Victoria did not even attend his coronation. There was a strong feeling of antagonism between the Duchess of Kent and William IV., which occasionally broke out into very unseemly manifestations, especially on the King's side. His was not a character which could claim respect, and still less evoke enthusiasm. As Duke of Clarence, he had lived for more than twenty years with Mrs. Jordan, the actress, by whom he had ten sons and daughters. His affection for them showed the best side of his character. He did not disown them; they bore the name of Fitz Clarence, and as soon as he was able he provided liberally for them. Greville says that his sons, with one exception, repaid his kindness with insolence and ingratitude. His affection for them did not prevent his desertion of their mother. He separated from her without any apparent cause, and endeavored to bring about a marriage between himself and a half-crazy woman of large fortune. The Prince Regent is said to have been the main plot of this scheme, which was never carried out. During the earlier part of his connection with Mrs. Jordan, the Duke of Clarence made her an allowance of £1,000 a year. At the suggestion of George III. he is said to have proposed by letter to Mrs. Jordan to reduce this sum to £500. Her reply was to send him the bottom part of a play-bill, on which were these words, "No money returned after the rising of the curtain." When he was a young man on active service in the navy and in command of a ship, he had twice absented himself from foreign stations without leave, and the Admiralty were at their wits' end to know how to deal with him.

The death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817, and later the death of the Duke of York, gave political importance to the Duke of Clarence's existence, and he was one of the batch of Royal Dukes who married, as we have seen, in 1818, not without unseemly haggling with the House of Commons as to the additional allowance to be voted for his support. The £10,000 a year proposed by the Government was cut down to £6,000 by a vote of 193 to 184. Lord Castlereagh then rose and said that "Since the House had thought proper to refuse the larger sum to the Duke of Clarence, he believed he might say that the negotiation for the marriage might be considered at an end;" and on the next day his Lordship announced to the House that "the Duke declined availing himself of the inadequate sum which had been voted to him." However, as the only practical reply to this was a vote by the House granting £6,000 a year to the Duke of Cambridge, and declining any grant at all for the unpopular Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Clarence appears to have thought better of his refusal of the grant, and the marriage accordingly took place. But there can be no surprise, under the circumstances, that such a union and the character it revealed awakened no popular interest. It should be said, however, that when he became King it was generally remarked that his elevation improved him. He became, Greville says, "most composed and rational, if not more dignified in his behavior." People began to like him, if not for his virtues, at any rate on account of the contrast he presented to his predecessor. His best qualities were frankness and honesty, and he also had the real and rather rare generosity of not bearing a grudge against those who had baffled or defeated him. Thus the Duke of Wellington had, when Prime Minister, removed the Duke of Clarence from the office of Lord High Admiral; but though exceedingly angry at the time, he never bore any grudge against the Duke of Wellington, or wreaked vengeance upon him in any way when he had the power to do so. On the contrary, when he became King he gave the Duke his fullest and most cordial confidence, retained him as Prime Minister, and took an early opportunity of publicly showing him honor by dining at Apsley House. It is the more pleasant to recall this instance of magnanimity on the part of William IV. because the annals of the time are full to overflowing of stories to the discredit of nearly all the sons of George III. The character of George IV. is well known. His quarrels with his wife and attempt to pass an Act of Divorce against her are notorious. In ghastly contrast to the pageantry of his coronation, in which it was said £240,000 were spent, those were present speak of the trill of horror which ran through the assembly when Queen Caroline was heard knocking at the door of the Abbey for the admittance which was refused her. "There was sudden silence and consternation; it was like the handwriting on the wall." George IV. was almost equally contemptible in every relation of life. His Ministers could with difficulty induce him to give attention to necessary business. "Indolent, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog" are the words by which he is described by the clerk of his Council. He delighted in keeping those who had business to transact with him waiting for hours while he was chatting about horses, or betting, or any trivial matter. Greville, after many years of close knowledge of George IV., says of him: "The littleness of his character prevents his displaying the dangerous faults that belong to great minds; but with vices and weaknesses of the lowest and most contemptible order it would be difficult to find a disposition more abundantly furnished." It is probably not too much to say that no one loved him living, or mourned him dead. Of his funeral Greville says in his cynical way: "The attendance was not very numerous, and when they had all got together in St. George's Hall, a gayer company I never beheld. … Merry were all, as merry as grigs." The King's brothers were not a very great improvement on the King. The Royal Dukes seemed to vie with each other in unseemly and indecorous behavior. On one occasion, in July, 1829, they attacked each other violently in the House of Lords, that is, "Clarence and Sussex attacked Cumberland, and he them very vehemently, and they used towards each other language which nobody else could have ventured to employ; so it was a very droll scene." With such brothers-in-law the position of the Duchess of Kenty must have been one of great difficulty and loneliness, and she was, consequently, thrown, more perhaps than she would otherwise have been, to rely for advice and companionship on her own brother, Prince Leopold. This Prince and his confidential secretary and friend, Stockmar, afterwards Baron Stockmar, were the trusted counsellors of the Duchess of Kent with regard to the education of Princess Victoria and her preparation for the difficult and responsible position she was afterwards to occupy. The quarrels and disputes that constantly arose between the Duchess of Kent and William IV. may have been attributable to faults on both sides; but the most innocent and indeed laudable actions of the Duchess, with regard to her daughter's training, seem to have been made the excuse for all kinds of complaint and acrimony on the part of the King. For instance, the Duchess felt that it was proper that her daughter, in view of the position she would hereafter occupy, should see as much as possible of the places of interest and importance in the kingdom she would be destined in time to reign over. Accordingly, she took the young Princess about to the chief manufacturing centres, as well as to places of historic interest, and localities where the rural beauty of England was to be seen in its greatest perfection. In this way she visited Birmingham, Worcester, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Chester, Lichfield, and Oxford, as well as Malvern, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, Kenilworth, Powis Castle, Wynnstay, Anglesey, and the Isle of Wight. It appears, however, that these apparently praiseworthy proceedings gave great offense at Court. The Duchess was supposed to seek more attention than her position justified her in demanding. A Council was summoned at Windsor on one occasion (in 1833) for the sole purpose of checking the manifestations of loyalty which the appearance of the Duchess and her daughter provoked. The King was devoured by spleen on hearing that salutes had been fired at the Isle of Wight in honor of these progresses of the heiress-presumptive and her mother. After absurd negotiations on the subject between the King and his sister-in-law, when neither had the good grace to give way, the fleet was commanded, by Order in Council, not to salute the Royal Standard unless the King or Queen was on board. On another occasion, offence seems to have been taken by the King where none was intended, because an address, received by the Duchess in 1835 at Burghley, alluded to her daughter as "destined to mount the throne of these realms." It was an additional offence that Sir John Conroy, the Duchess's controller of the household, "handed the answer, just as the Prime Minister does to the King." With every action, even on the part of others, thus misinterpreted, it was no wonder that the Duchess could have no cordial feelings towards her husband's family. George IV. openly showed his dislike for her, the Duke of Cumberland never lost an opportunity of aggravating the unfriendliness of their relations. When William IV. succeeded, the Duchess of Kent wrote to the Duke of Wellington, as Prime Minister, to request that she might be treated as a Dowager Princess of Wales, with an income suitable for herself and her daughter, for whom she also asked recognition as heiress to the throne. These requests met with a positive refusal, at which the Duchess expressed considerable vexation. Afterwards, when a Regency Bill was brought forward to provide for the event of the death of the King while the Princess Victoria was still a minor, although the right thing was done, and the Duchess was named Regent, the old feeling of hostility was not removed between herself and the King and his brothers, and during nearly the whole of William IV.'s seven years' reign there were constant bickerings and disputes between Windsor and Kensington. Matters were made worse by William's love of making speeches, in which he set forth, with more vigor than dignity, his grievances, or what he considered such. Greville says he had a passion for speechifying, and had a considerable facility in expressing himself, but that what he said was generally useless or improper. An instance in point is to be found in the "Life of Archbishop Tait," who wrote in his diary, December 4th, 1856, that Dr. Langley told him that when he did homage to William IV. on his first appointment as Bishop, no sooner had he risen from his knees than the King suddenly addressed him in a loud voice thus: "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d——d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England." Even when proposing the Princess Victoria's health and speaking kindly of her, he could not resist the public announcement that he had not seen so much of her as he could have wished (Aug., 1836). On another occasion, he loudly and publicly expressed to the Duchess his strong disapprobation of her having appropriated apartments at Kensington Palace beyond those which had been assigned to her, and spoke of what she had done as "an unwarrantable liberty." A still worse outbreak shortly followed. At his birthday banquet in 1836, in the presence of a hundred people, with the Duchess of Kent sitting next to him and the Princess Victoria opposite, he expressed with more vigor than delicacy the hope that he might live nine months longer, so that the Princess might attain her majority, and the regency of the Duchess never come into operation. He referred to the Duchess as "a person now near me who is surrounded by evil advisers, and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed." A great deal more in the same style followed; "an awful philippic," Greville calls it, 'uttered with a loud voice and excited manner." The King's animosity against the Duchess was extended to, and may perhaps have been provoked by, her brother. He had given offence by calling on Queen Caroline after the conclusion of the evidence against her in the House of Lords. He appears himself to have thought the action required an excuse, and says, "But how abandon entirely the mother of Princess Charlotte, who, though she knew her mother well, loved her very much?" George IV. was furious, and never forgave his son-in-law. William IV. shared his brother's sentiments in regard to Leopold, and invariably treated him with coldness, and sometimes with rudeness that amounted to brutality. After he had become King of the Belgians, Leopold visited William IV. at Windsor, and during dinner made an innocent request for water. The King asked, "What's that you are drinking, sir?" "Water, sir." "God d— it!" rejoined the other King, "why don't you drink wine? I never allow any one to drink water at my table." The King of the Belgians must have felt like a man living among wild beasts, and it is not surprising to read that he did not sleep at Windsor that night, but went away in the evening. There was not a subject on which they agreed. William IV. was a Tory of the Tories; Prince Leopold was a Whig. King William's chief political interest was the preservation of the slave trade; Prince Leopold was deeply interested in its abolition. The same antagonism between them ran through all subjects, great and small.

These anecdotes of the coarseness and brutality of the Queen's immediate predecessors have been recalled for the purpose of illustrating the extreme difficulty of the position in which the Duchess of Kent found herself from the time of her husband's death to that of her daughter's accession. It also serves to explain an expression used in after years by the Queen in reference to her choice of the name of Leopold for her youngest son, where she says, "It is the name which is dearest to me after Albert, one which recalls the almost only happy days of my sad childhood." But if the Princess Victoria was unfortunate in some of her uncles, her uncle Leopold went far to redress the balance. At one time the prospect before him, as husband of Princess Charlotte, had been identical with the position afterwards occupied by Prince Albert. He had become a naturalized Englishman, and he had given great thought and study to the English Constitutional history, and particularly to the duties and responsibilities of a Constitutional monarch. He had strong personal ambition, disciplined by ability and conscientiousness. In 1817 the death of his wife dashed the cup of ambition from his lips. A contemporary letter speaks of him as Adam "turned out of Paradise without his Eve." From the important position of husband of the Heiress Apparent he sunk in one day to that of a subordinate member of the Royal Family, necessarily, as we have seen, out of sympathy with them and aloof from them. "Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not," was the lesson of 1817 to him. With great power of personal abnegation, his disappointment did not imbitter him, his ambition did not turn sour. He transferred it and all his plans and all his interest in English constitutionalism to a little niece and nephew who were born respectively on the 24th of May and 26th of August, 1819. The little Victoria at Kensington and the little Albert at Coburg were destined by their uncle Leopold almost from their birth to play the part that would have been filled by the Princess Charlotte and himself but for her early death. He had, of course, no absolute power to bring this marriage about, but he earnestly desired it, and prepared the way for it by every means at his command. He won, as he deserved to win, the Princess Victoria's most ardent affection. She has told us herself how she "adored" her uncle. He took his mother, the Duchess Dowager of Coburg, a very able woman, into his confidence. She wholly shared his views and hopes. From the time he was three years old Prince Albert was accustomed to the idea that when he was old enough he was to marry his cousin, Princess Victoria of England. The first mention of Prince Albert as a husband was made to the Queen by her uncle Leopold. The education of both children was conducted with this end in view. This was no doubt a chief bone of contention between Prince Leopold and his sister the Duchess of Kent on the one hand, and the King and his party on the other. For William IV. highly disapproved of the proposed union, and did everything in his power to stop it, proposing in succession no fewer than five other marriages for the young Princess. It throws a light too on his resentment at the degree to which the Princess Victoria was withdrawn from his Court, so that hardly any influence could reach her antagonistic to that of her uncle Leopold. William IV.'s explosions of rage against the Duchess of Kent are illustrative of this; they are those of a stupid man, nominally in a position of authority, but baffled and outwitted, and consequently furious. It was too well for the Princess Victoria and for England too that he was not the predominant influence in her education; but it is not difficult to understand his wrath. The game of cross purposes was constantly going on, and the King was constantly being worsted. The duchess of Kent selected as her daughter's tutor the Rev. George Davys. The King objected that the education of the heiress-presumptive to the throne should be under the care of some distinguished prelate. The Duchess acquiesced, and, while retaining the services of Dr. Davys, intimated that there would be objection on her part to his receiving the highest ecclesiastical preferment. A very extensive knowledge of human nature is not needed to know that this sort of thing is to the last degree irritating, nor that the fact of the Duchess and her brother being generally in the right, and the King generally in the wrong, was not soothing to the latter.^[3]

In this too stormy atmosphere the heiress of England was reared. Her naturally happy disposition and healthy physical constitution carried her through with less disadvantages than other less happily endowed natures would have sustained. Among other relatives who were uniformly kind and considerate to the young Princess special mention should be made of the Duke of York, whom she loved like a second father. His death, in 1827, was her first real sorrow as a child. Queen Adelaide also was uniformly kind and loving to her niece. Her own two baby girls had died in their infancy, and she transferred a good deal of motherly tenderness to Princess Victoria. A meaner nature would have resented the place of her own child being filled by another; but Queen Adelaide showed none of this littleness, and welcomed her niece with cordiality to her rightful place beside the throne. When the second of Queen Adelaide's own little girls died, she wrote to the Duchess of Kent, "My children are dead, but yours lives, and she is mine, too!" The simple words give the note of a truly noble nature. In 1831, when King William prorogued his first Parliament, Queen Adelaide and Princess Victoria watched from the windows of the Palace the progress of the Royal procession. "The people cheered the Queen lustily, but, forgetting herself, that gracious lady took the young Princess Victoria by the hand, led her to the front of the balcony, and introduced her to the happy and loyal multitude."^[4] On several other occasions Queen Adelaide showed a noble, queenly, and motherly spirit towards the young Princess. In 1837 and onwards, Queen Victoria was able, by a number of little nameless acts of kindness and of love, to cheer and sooth the declining years of the Queen Dowager.

1. The Duke of Kent was chiefly known in the army for his extreme insistence in military etiquette, discipline, dress, and equipments. He was, however, the first to abandon flogging, and to establish a regimental school.—Dictionary of National Biography.
2. In reminiscences contributed by the King of the Belgians, as an appendix to "Early Years of the Prince Consort," it is stated that the Duke's fatal cold was caught when visiting Salisbury Cathedral.
3. It should be remarked that whatever the faults and shortcomings of William IV. may have been, the Queen herself never refers to him but in terms of affection and gratitude.
4. G. Barnett Smith, "Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.