were, on awaking, to feel ourselves here, at the dear Rosenau, my Albert's birthplace, the place he most loves! He was so happy to be here with me. It is like a beautiful dream.’ On 2 Sept. they left Gotha on their return. Here the prince saw for the last time his grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Gotha, whose motherlike affection for him he had requited with all a son's love. ‘When at last,’ writes the queen, ‘we were obliged to leave, she clasped him in her arms, and kissed him again and again, saying “Gott segne Dich, mein Engel!” (God bless you, my angel!) in such a plaintive voice.’ She died on 7 Feb. 1848.
The return to England was made by way of Antwerp, where the King and Queen of the Belgians met the royal visitors. In fulfilment of an old promise Tréport was taken on the way back to England. Here a very cordial reception was given to the queen and prince by King Louis-Philippe. It was during this visit that the king, in conversation with the queen, the prince, and Lord Aberdeen, volunteered the declaration, subsequently violated, that he entertained no designs which could have the effect of placing any of his sons upon the Spanish throne.
Meanwhile the state of affairs in England had become critical. A wet season had blighted the prospects of the farmers, while the potato disease made famine imminent in Ireland. Peel, convinced that free trade in corn was inevitable, but that it was unmeet he should initiate the change, resigned; but, on the failure of Lord John Russell to form a ministry, consented to remain in office, and to face the hostility of the party which had originally placed him there. The prince could not but admire Peel's courage in adopting this resolution. So important was the crisis that he went to the House of Commons (29 Jan. 1846) to hear the debate upon Peel's financial statement. Such, however, was the heated state of men's minds, that this innocent wish to hear a great debate was construed by the party led by Lord George Bentinck into a manœuvre of the minister to give the semblance of royal sanction to his measures. The prince felt that he must never again expose himself to the risk of similar misconstruction, and was thus deprived of the satisfaction of being present at any of the debates of either house. During this stormy session and the ministerial crisis which ensued on the fall of Peel's ministry at the end of June, the queen writes, the prince's ‘use to me and to the country by his firmness and sagacity is beyond all belief.’ He had by this time made himself fully master of the political situation at home and abroad, and his judgment and sagacity were daily making themselves more and more felt by the statesmen whose position at the head of affairs brought them into more immediate contact with him. Politics had now indeed become his favourite study. In the painful controversy which arose on the subject of the Spanish marriages in the autumn of 1846, and especially in the correspondence to which it led between the royal family of France and Queen Victoria, his advice was of the greatest service to her majesty. He foresaw, what was proved by the event, that Louis-Philippe's conduct in the affair would give a shock not only to his reputation throughout Europe, but to the stability of his government in the troublous epoch of revolutionary change which seemed to the prince to be fast approaching. The days of despotic and aristocratic supremacy, he felt, had gone by, and changes were inevitable, which should make rulers feel that their people did not live for them, but that they must live for their people.
In February 1847 the prince was elected chancellor of Cambridge University after a keen contest in competition with Lord Powis. The ceremony of installation took place at Cambridge on 5 July in the presence of the queen. ‘Never,’ writes the prince to Stockmar, ‘have I seen people in such good humour. There was a great gathering of bishops, scholars, royal personages, nobles, and political men, and all seemed well pleased. My Latin, too, proved a success.’ The prince was much gratified by this event, as one among many significant indications that, while he was gaining by degrees the confidence of the country, the queen was growing in popularity and establishing a firmer hold upon the loyalty of her people.
This was no unimportant gain, for the times were rapidly becoming more and more critical for crowned heads in Europe. Portugal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, were all penetrated by a revolutionary spirit. Wherever the prince was free to use his influence abroad to induce such changes in the prevailing systems as might avert the dangers of resistance to legitimate reforms, he did not fail to express his opinions, and these were already coming to be recognised throughout the Continent as those of a sagacious statesman. But the lessons he inculcated were only to be learned under a sterner pressure. By the end of 1847 the cry for independence had been raised throughout the north of Italy. Sicily was in full revolt, Naples had extorted a liberal constitution from its sovereign, Tuscany and Sardinia had done the same, and on 24 Feb. 1848 a revolution in Paris drove Louis-Philippe and his family into exile. England
