The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

thought shines through the last entry which the Queen makes with reference to the event. “We had spent,” she writes in her Diary, “a truly pleasant and most interesting time. To see my Albert honoured and esteemed, as he deserves, gives me the deepest satisfaction.... We reached Buckingham Palace at half-past four, and found the children all well. I felt tired and étourdie. We walked a little in the garden, then dined alone, and spent a dear, peaceful, happy evening.”

      Here, perhaps, it may be permissible to say that Cambridge has ever been endeared to her Majesty by reason of many pleasant associations of her early married life which gather round it. As has been stated in a previous Chapter, it was at Cambridge in October, 1843, that Prince Albert first gained any insight into the English University system, during a visit which he and the Queen paid, quite informally, to Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity.84 They had a brilliant reception on that occasion, some two thousand horsemen accompanying them with shouts of welcome. The Royal pair had Whewell for a host and a cicerone, and Prince Albert, in a letter to Baron Stockmar, gives a glowing account of the enthusiasm with which he was received. Many good stories were told of the visit in the University after they left. Professor Sedgwick, the geologist, held some interesting conversation with the Prince in the Woodwardian Museum, and was quite surprised to find that he was a geologist of sound culture, who took much pleasure in teaching the Queen all he knew about the monsters of the Old World, whose history seemed greatly to interest her. The Professor was, however, nonplussed when her Majesty asked him where the head of his pet Ichthyosaurus, which he was unpacking, came from, and was fain to cover his ignorance for the moment by saying, much to her Majesty’s amusement, that doubtless “it came as a delegate from the monsters of the lower world to greet her Majesty on her arrival at the University.”85

      It was on this occasion that the Queen made the acquaintance of her rugged but kindly host—the Master of Trinity—a rough diamond who had raised himself by sheer ability from the humble position of a sizar, to be virtually the intellectual head of the University. “W. and I,” writes Mrs. Whewell to her mother,86 “received commands to dine with the Queen at eight o’clock; hasty notices were sent out to those whom she would receive in the evening. At dinner, the Queen, and, still more, the Prince, asked my husband questions about the University and College, to which he gave such full answers, and they seemed to take so much interest in hearing them, that it quite took off the disagreeable effect of a Royal categorical conversation.... Certainly the Queen and Prince seemed to like it. After dinner, in the drawing-room, the Queen asked me if these were prints which lay on the table. I had taken care to place some interesting ones there, for the chance of her looking at them. The book she took most notice of was an old book by Sir Edward Stanhope, of coats-of-arms of our founders and benefactors, which we had got out of the Muniment Room. I pointed out some of the changes—Henry VIII.’s, for instance, with the rouge dragon of Cadwallader, the last of the Britons, for a supporter; James I.’s, with the unicorn. When Prince Albert came up-stairs she pointed it out to him. He seemed a very good herald, and told me several foreign coats that had quite puzzled me, and also Lord and Lady Maybrooke, who are great heralds.” On going away the Queen gave Mrs. Whewell a pretty bracelet, “saying she wished to give it to me with her own hands.... She spoke very kindly indeed, and Prince Albert came and said that the only thing he regretted was the

      FALMOUTH HARBOUR.

      shortness of the visit. She proceeded to the door; the Master was on the stairs. We accompanied them, walking as much backwards as we could.” This part of the etiquette seems to have severely exercised the kindly Cambridge dons, unused as they were to Court ceremonial. Sedgwick says, for example, with reference to the Royal visit to the Woodwardian Museum, “I will only add that I went through every kind of backward movement to the admiration of all beholders, only having once trodden on the hinder part of my cassock, and never once having fallen during my retrogradations before the face of the Queen. In short, had I been a king-crab I could not have walked backwards better.” Of the Queen the brusque old Master of Trinity himself wrote:—“She was very kind in all her expressions to us; told Cordelia that everything in her apartments ‘was so nice and so comfortable,’ and at parting gave her a very pretty bracelet. The Prince was very agreeable, intelligent, and conversible, seemed much interested with all he saw, and talked a good deal about his German University, Bonn.... At dinner I was opposite the Queen, who talked easily and cheerfully. I had also a good deal of occasion to talk to her, in showing her the lions of Cambridge,

      THE ROYAL VISIT TO FINGAL’S CAVE. (See p. 319.)

      which she ran over very rapidly. It is no small matter to provide for the Queen’s reception, even as we did. We had about forty servants of the Queen in the house, besides a dozen men belonging to the stable department who were in the town. The Queen’s coachman is reported to have said that he had taken her Majesty to many places, but never to anywhere where she was so well received, or where the ale was so good.”

      These little reminiscences of the Queen’s early life are not, when rightly regarded, altogether trivial. They give us a delightful picture of a nature doubly royal—royal not merely by birth, but by what birth can never give—the easy affability of manner, the unaffected determination to please and be pleased, the true politeness and tender graces of demeanour which spring from the natural sunshine of the heart, and before which the pedantries of etiquette seem ghastly unrealities. Nothing can illustrate her Majesty’s simple geniality of heart better than a story about her visit to Cambridge, which it may be remarked Whewell does not tell. He was no courtier, as all the world knew, and he treated the Queen in the old-fashioned hospitable manner which the middle-class gentry in England assume towards their guests. The morning after her arrival he accordingly came down bustling into the room quite unceremoniously, and, to the horror of the Lords and Ladies in waiting, ignoring all Court etiquette, he walked up quite coolly and saluted her with brusque frankness as follows:—“Good-morning, your Majesty! How d’ye do? Hope your Majesty slept well. Fine morning, isn’t it?” to which the Queen, to the astonishment of her suite, returned an equally cordial answer, wreathed in the sweetest of smiles.

      The visit to Scotland was arranged in August, after the General Election brought peace for a time into the political world. On the 11th of August the Royal party left Osborne in the Royal yacht; “our party,” says Prince Albert, “being composed of Victoria and myself, the two eldest children, with Miss Hildyard, Charles (Prince of Leiningen), the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, Lady Jocelyn, General Wemyss, and Sir James Clark.” On the 12th they succeeded, in spite of the mist, in getting well out towards the Atlantic, but though the Prince, thanks to the advice of Admiral Sir Charles Napier, whose panacea for sea-sickness was a glass of port wine, stood the voyage well, some of the party were so sea-sick that they had to abandon the yacht at Falmouth. On the 13th they paid a hazardous visit to “the dogs of Scilly”—as one of the party observed to the Prince, “That is a very good thing over; I should think you will never care to see them again;” and on the 14th, under brighter skies and over smoother seas, they neared the Welsh coast, making land at Milford Haven, and anchoring under the shadow of its red cliffs. The Prince paid a flying visit to Pembroke Dockyard and Castle, but the Queen sat on deck sketching, as was often her favourite custom in these cruises to Scotland. On the 15th they were opposite the Isle of Anglesea, gazing with silent rapture on the hoary head of Snowdon rising from the midst of a sea of surrounding verdure. The Victoria and Albert was then sent to Holyhead, the Royal party proceeding in the Fairy through the Menai Straits, and passing the old Keep of Carnarvon, and Plas Newydd, and many other places recalling to the mind of the Queen touching reminiscences of a Welsh tour which, when Princess Victoria, she had made with her mother. On the 16th they ran into Douglas Bay and Ramsey Harbour in the Isle of Man, where, remarks Prince Albert in a letter to Stockmar, the good people “put in their paper that I led the Prince Regent (the little Prince of Wales) by the hand.” “Usually,” he adds humorously, “one has a Regent for an infant; but in Man it seems precisely the reverse.” On the 17th they were tossing in wonderment before the beetling cliffs of Ailsa Craig, their ears deafened by the screams of the sea-birds that wheeled and whirled in clouds