Queen Victoria. Story of Her Life and Reign. Unknown

      Queen Victoria / Story of Her Life and Reign, 1819-1901

      'Her court was pure, her life serene;

      God gave her peace; her land reposed;

      A thousand claims to reverence closed

      In her as Mother, Wife, and Queen.'

TENNYSON.

      'God bless the Queen for all her unwearied goodness! I admire her as a woman, love her as a friend, and reverence her as a Queen. Her courage, patience, and endurance are marvellous to me.'

NORMAN MACLEOD.

      'A Prince indeed,

      Beyond all titles, and a household name,

      Hereafter, through all time, Albert the Good.'

TENNYSON.

PREFACE

      This brief life of Queen Victoria gives the salient features of her reign, including the domestic and public life, with a glance at the wonderful history and progress of our country during the past half-century. In the space at command it has been impossible to give extended treatment. The history is necessarily very brief, as also the account of the public and private life, yet it is believed no really important feature of her life and reign has been omitted.

      It is a duty, incumbent on old and young alike, as well as a pleasing privilege, to mark how freedom has slowly 'broadened down, from precedent to precedent,' and how knowledge, wealth, and well-being are more widely distributed to-day than at any former period of our history. And this knowledge can only increase the gratitude of the reader for the golden reign of Queen Victoria, of whom it has been truly written:

      A thousand claims to reverence closed

      In her as Mother, Wife, and Queen.

      CHAPTER I

      Reign of Queen Victoria—Outlook of Royalty in 1819—Duke and Duchess of Kent—Birth of Victoria—Wisely trained by Duchess of Kent—Taught by Fräulein Lehzen—Anecdotes of this Period—Discovers that she is next to the Throne.

      The reign of Queen Victoria may be aptly described as a period of progress in all that related to the well-being of the subjects of her vast empire. In every department of science, literature, politics, and the practical life of the nation, there has been steady improvement and progress. Our ships circumnavigate the globe and do the chief carrying trade of the world. The locomotive binds industrial centres, and abridges time and space as it speeds along its iron pathway; whilst steam-power does the work of thousands of hands in our large factories. The telegraph links us to our colonies, and to the various nationalities of the world, in commerce and in closer sympathy; and never was the hand and heart of Benevolence busier than in this later period of the nineteenth century. Our colonial empire has shared also in the welfare and progress of the mother-country.

      When we come to look into the lives of the Queen and Prince-Consort, we are thankful for all they have been and done. The wider our survey of history, and the more we know of other rulers and courts, the more thankful we shall be that they have been a guiding and balancing power, allied to all that was progressive, noble, and true, and for the benefit of the vast empire over which Her Majesty reigns. And the personal example has been no less valuable in

      Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

      Before a thousand peering littlenesses,

      In that fierce light which heats upon a throne,

      And blackens every blot.

      In the year 1819 the family outlook of the British royal house was not a very bright one. The old king, George III., was lingering on in deep seclusion, a very pathetic figure, blind and imbecile. His son the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV., had not done honour to his position, nor brought happiness to any connected with him. Most of the other princes were elderly men and childless; and the Prince-Regent's only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, on whom the hopes of the nation had rested, and whose marriage had raised those hopes to enthusiasm, was newly laid in her premature grave.

      But almost immediately after Princess Charlotte's death, the king's third and fourth sons, the Dukes of Clarence and Kent, had married. Of the Duke of Clarence we need say little more. He and his consort eventually reigned as William IV. and Queen Adelaide, and they had two children who died in earliest infancy, and did not further complicate the succession to the crown.

      The Duke of Kent, born in 1767, fourth son of George III.—a tall, stately man, of soldierly hearing, inclined to corpulency and entirely bald—married the widowed Princess of Leiningen, already the mother of a son and a daughter by her first husband. The duke was of active, busy habits; and he was patron of many charitable institutions—he presided over no less than seventy-two charity meetings in 1816. Baron Stockmar describes the Princess of Leiningen after her marriage in 1818, as 'of middle height, rather large, but with a good figure, with fine brown eyes and hair, fresh and youthful, naturally cheerful and friendly; altogether most charming and attractive. She was fond of dress, and dressed well and in good taste. Nature had endowed her with warm feelings, and she was naturally truthful, affectionate, and unselfish, full of sympathy, and generous.' The princely pair lived in Germany until the birth of a child was expected, when the duke at first thought of taking a house in Lanarkshire—which would have made Queen Victoria by birth a Scotchwoman. Eventually, the Duke and Duchess of Kent took up their abode in Kensington Palace.

      On the 24th May 1819, their daughter was born, and she was named Alexandrina Victoria, after the reigning Emperor of Russia and her mother. The Prince Regent had wished the name of Georgiana; her own father wished to call her Elizabeth. The little one was the first of the British royal house to receive the benefits of Jenner's discovery of vaccination. The Duke of Kent was so careful of his little girl that he took a cottage at Sidmouth to escape the London winter. To a friend he wrote: 'My little girl thrives under the influence of a Devonshire climate, and is, I am delighted to say, strong and healthy; too healthy, I fear, in the opinion of some members of my family, by whom she is regarded as an intruder.' Next winter the Duke came in one day, after tramping through rain and snow, and played with his little child while in his damp clothes; he thus contracted a chill from which he never rallied, and died January 23, 1820.

      This child was destined to be the Empress-Queen, on whose dominion the sun never sets. Yet so remote did such a destiny then seem, owing to the possibilities of the Regent's life, and of children being born to the Duke of Clarence, that in some courtly biographies of George III. there is no mention made of the birth of the little princess. Even in their accounts of the death of her father the Duke of Kent, seven months afterwards, they do not deem it necessary to state that he left a daughter behind him; though he, poor man, had never had any doubts of her future importance, and had been in the habit of saying to her attendants, 'Take care of her, for she may be Queen of England.' The Duke of Kent was a capable and energetic soldier, of pure tastes and simple pleasures. In presenting new colours to the Royal Scots in 1876, the Queen said: 'I have been associated with your regiment from my earliest infancy, as my dear father was your colonel. He was proud of his profession, and I was always told to consider myself a soldier's child.'

      The position of the widowed Duchess of Kent, a stranger in a foreign country, was rather sad and lonely. It was further complicated by narrowness of means. The old king, her father-in-law, died soon after her husband. The duchess was a woman of sense and spirit. Instead of yielding to any natural impulse to retire to Germany, she resolved that her little English princess should have an English rearing. She found a firm friend and upholder in her brother Leopold, husband of the late Princess Charlotte, and afterwards King of the Belgians. On discovering her straitened means he gave her an allowance of £3000 a year, which was continued until it was no longer necessary in 1831. As the duke came into a separate income only at a late period of his life, he had died much in debt. Long afterwards the Queen said to Lord Melbourne: 'I want to pay all that remains of my father's debts. I must do it. I consider it a sacred duty.' And she did not rest till she did it. In reply to an address of congratulation on the coming of age of the Queen, the Duchess of Kent said:

      'My late regretted consort's circumstances, and my duties,