wrote, "prayed at home." A special trial belonging to the position of Royalty must be its isolation. No subject can be on terms of equality with a Sovereign; crowned heads are therefore thrown almost wholly on their own immediate families for that life-giving sympathy and criticism which can hardly exist in perfection except between equals. To the Queen the loss of her mother, followed by the loss of her husband, brought the silencing of the only voices in the world who could say to her, in love, "You have been wrong, you have made a mistake." Consider what it must be never to hear any language except that of homage and respect, never to listen to plain truths put plainly, never to be laughed at, seldom to be laughed with; and then imagine what it must be to lose the few who belong to that close inner circle for whom these formalities are non-existent.[1] One can only compare it to the position of a man on a desert island, who, having possessed a Bible or a Shakespeare, wakes one morning to find them destroyed or carried away by the tide. It has been sometimes said by English women that the Queen's loss when she lost her husband was not greater than that of thousands and millions of women among her subjects; it has even been said that Her Majesty's loss was not so great: some women, at one blow, by the death of their husbands, are face to face with the wolf of poverty and hunger for themselves and their children. No one can think lightly of such anguish; but if the inner history of
- ↑ The Queen gave expression to this sense of isolation, as a necessary part of the position of a Sovereign, in a private letter to the Emperor of the French, dated August, 1857. She wrote, after thanking the Emperor for his expressions of favorable opinion about the Prince Consort: "In a position so isolated as ours, we can find no greater consolation, no support more sure, than the sympathy and counsel of him or her who is called on to share our lot in life; and the dear Empress, with her generous impulses, is your guardian angel, as the Prince is my true friend."
