THE QUEEN WEDDED.

On the day after the departure of the Princes, the Queen wrote letters to the Queen Dowager, and the other members of the Royal Family, informing them of her intended marriage, and received kind letters in return from all. A few days later she and her mother came from Windsor to Buckingham Palace, where Lord Melbourne submitted the draft of the proposed Declaration to the Privy Council. His Lordship told the Queen that the Cabinet had unanimously agreed that £50,000 would be an appropriate annual allowance for the Prince, and that they anticipated no Parliamentary opposition to that amount. He also stated that there had been a stupid attempt to make it out that he was a Roman Catholic, and that “he was afraid to say anything about his religion,” and accordingly had not touched upon it in the Declaration. This turned out, as we shall see, a very unwise omission; it actually gave colour and consistency to the absurd report.

On the 23rd of November, eighty-three members of the Privy Council met in Buckingham Palace. Precisely at two the Queen entered. She evinced much natural agitation, but was considerably reassured by a kindly and paternal look from her staunch friend, Lord Melbourne; whereupon she read the Declaration, which ran thus:—

The moment the Queen had read the Declaration, Lord Lansdowne rose and asked, in the name of the Council, that “this most gracious and most welcome communication might be printed.” Leave was granted, and Her Majesty left the room, the whole ceremony having occupied only two or three minutes. The Duke of Cambridge followed his niece into the ante-room, and warmly congratulated her. The Declaration appeared in the next Gazette, whence it was copied into all the newspapers, and was joyfully read and received over the whole land.

There were now important questions to be settled, in Parliament, in the Council, and by the exercise of the Royal prerogative, as to the future rank and station of the Prince. Such were—Should he be made a peer? as had been the last consort of an English Queen, Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, of whom the only good thing that can be said is, that he accidentally made Arbuthnot, Pope’s great friend and fellow-labourer, his Court physician. The idea of being made a peer was strenuously, sensibly, and successfully resisted by the Prince. Then there were the practical questions of his naturalisation, the selection of his Household, his position in the scale of precedence, and his income. So far as the Prince legitimately could and did meddle with the solution of these knotty points, he showed, when necessary, great sagacity, and a firmness very wondrous in one so young. From the very moment of his betrothal, he regarded himself as the custodian and guardian of his future wife’s, rather than his own, independent position and unfettered dignity. It was not himself, but the husband of the Queen on behalf of whom he took a firm line.

The Queen wished to give her husband precedence next after herself. Some difficulty was experienced in procuring the consent of the Royal Dukes, but at last their scruples were removed. Only the King of Hanover stubbornly held out, and the Duke of Wellington, in the House of Peers, declined on behalf of his party to consent. The proposal was, therefore, withdrawn from Parliament, but shortly after the Queen conferred a patent of precedence by the exercise of her own prerogative. On a similar matter of dispute, it was not until the Prince himself had pointed out the unaccountably overlooked precedent of the privilege as enjoyed by Prince Leopold in the life-time of the Princess Charlotte, that Garter King-at-Arms could be induced to withdraw his opinion adverse to Prince Albert quartering the Royal Arms of England with his own.In the matter of his Household, the Prince’s own admirable judgment solved the difficulty with the clear adroitness of honest simplicity. He stipulated that considerations of party should have nothing to do with these appointments; that they should be filled by men of undoubted probity and purity of character; and he indicated his decided wish that they should be men of some kind of eminence; either very rich, very clever, or men who had deserved well of their country in the field of science or of arms. These wishes, to the Prince’s considerable annoyance, were not all closely followed out.

The Queen was tremendously cheered when, in January, 1840, she went to open Parliament, and no doubt was left in her mind as to the thorough popularity of the proposed union. The announcement of her intention contained in the Speech was a virtual repetition of that already made to the Council. From both sides of both Houses she was personally congratulated, and her choice approved, but the Duke of Wellington strongly objected to the omission of the statement that the Prince was a Protestant, with some shrewdness attributing its absence to Melbourne’s reluctance to irritate his Irish Catholic supporters. The Duke at the same time repeated again and again his own perfect personal conviction in the thorough fidelity of the Prince to the historic and heroic Protestantism of his race. Lord Brougham spoke on this point, and very pertinently: “I may remark,” he said, “that my noble friend (Lord Melbourne) is mistaken as to the law. There is no prohibition as to marriage with a Catholic. It is only attended with a penalty, and that penalty is merely the forfeiture of the Crown.” In spite of this, a sentence asserting the fact of the Prince’s Protestantism was, at the Duke of Wellington’s instance, inserted in the Address agreed to in answer to the Speech from the Throne.

There remained only the question of the Prince’s annuity. Ministers proposed £50,000. A very large majority negatived a proposal by Mr. Hume to reduce it to £20,000. But the Tory leaders supported a proposal of Colonel Sibthorpe’s to reduce it to £30,000, and by a considerable majority this was carried. The Queen, and her uncle Leopold, were extremely angry at the time at what they conceived to be the personal slight conveyed in this fact. But the Queen, under the wise and placable guidance of the Prince, afterwards learned to attribute it to the then heat of party rancour, still unallayed after the Bedchamber dispute; and the Prince at an early period of his residence in England contracted warm and abiding friendships with many of the men who had most strongly resisted Ministers on each of the above contested points.

On the 28th of January, Prince Albert, accompanied by Lord Torrington and Colonel (now General) Grey, who had been sent to invest him with the insignia of the Garter and conduct him in due state to England, set out from Gotha, as we have already seen at a previous page. He was also accompanied by his father and brother. After a passing visit to King Leopold at Brussels, they were met at Calais by Lord Clarence Paget, who commanded the Firebrand, and escorted the distinguished visitors to the shores of England, at which they arrived on the 6th of February. After magnificent and most hearty receptions at Dover and Canterbury, they reached Buckingham Palace in the afternoon of Saturday, the 8th of February, where the Prince found his bride standing with her mother at the door, ready to be the first to meet and to greet him. Half an hour later, the Lord Chancellor administered the oath of naturalisation, and the Prince became a subject of Queen Victoria. A grand dinner to the Prince, the Ministers, and the great officers of State succeeded in the evening. The next day the Prince drove out, amid the cheers of immense crowds, to pay formal visits to all the members of the Royal Family.

Monday, the 10th, was the day appointed for the wedding, which was magnificently celebrated in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace. On the morning of that day a larger crowd assembled in St. James’s Park and its approaches than had been collected together in the metropolis since the rejoicings at the visit of the Allied Sovereigns in 1814. Not even the extreme inclemency of the weather abated either the patience or enthusiasm of the multitude. After the ladies and gentlemen of the Households of the Queen and the Prince had been driven along the Mall from the palace of residence to the palace of state, and the carriages which conveyed them had returned, the bridegroom was notified that all was in readiness for his departure. He set out, dressed as a British field-marshal, and with all the insignia of the Garter, the jewels of which had been a personal present from the Queen, having on one side his father and on the other his brother, both in military uniforms. He entered his carriage amid tremendous cheers, and the enthusiastic waving of handkerchiefs by a bevy of ladies privileged to stand in the grand lobbies of the palace, and was escorted to the chapel by a squadron of the Life Guards. On the return of the carriages which carried the Prince and his company, Her Majesty was in turn apprised that all was in readiness for her departure. She, too, was enthusiastically received, “but her eye was bent principally upon the ground.” In the same carriage with the Queen rode the Duchesses of Kent and Sutherland. It was noticed as she drove along that she was extremely pale, and looked very anxious, though two or three incidents in the crowd caused her to smile.

On her arrival at her palace of St. James’s, the Queen was conducted to the Presence Chamber, where she remained with her maids-of-honour and trainbearers, awaiting the Lord Chamberlain’s summons to the altar. Meanwhile, the colonnade within the palace, along which the bridal procession had to pass and repass, had been filled since early morn by the Élite of England’s rank and beauty. Each side of the way was a parterre of white robes, white relieved with blue, white and green, amber, crimson, purple, fawn, and stone colour. All wore wedding favours of lace, orange-flower blossoms, or silver bullion, some of great size, and many in most exquisite taste. Most of the gentlemen were in court dress; and the scene during the patient hours of waiting was made picturesque by the passing to and fro in various garbs of burly yeomen of the guard, armed with their massive halberts, slight-built gentlemen-at-arms, with partisans of equal slightness; elderly pages of state, and pretty pages of honour; officers of the Lord Chamberlain, and officers of the Woods and Forests; heralds all embroidery, and cuirassiers in polished steel; prelates in their rochets, and priests in their stoles, and singing boys in their surplices of virgin white.

Within the chapel, in which the altar was magnificently decorated and laden with a profusion of gold plate, four state chairs were set, varying in splendour according to the rank of the destined occupants, respectively for Her Majesty, Prince Albert, the Queen Dowager, and the Duchess of Kent. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishop of London, having taken their places within the altar-rails, a flourish of trumpets announced the procession of the bridegroom. As the Prince passed along, the gentlemen greeted him with loud clapping of the hands, and the ladies waved their handkerchiefs with at least equal enthusiasm.

In a few minutes the procession of the bride was announced by trumpets and drums. It was of six or seven times the numerical strength of the bridegroom’s, and the beauty of the twelve bridesmaids, all daughters of peers of the three highest grades, was specially commended. The Duchess of Cambridge led by the hand her then child-daughter, the Princess Mary, “and the mother of so beautiful a child was certainly not to be seen without much interest.” The Duchess of Kent appeared “disconsolate and distressed;” while the Duke of Sussex, who was to give away the bride, was “in excellent spirits.” The Queen herself looked “anxious and excited, and paler even than usual.” She was dressed in a rich white satin, trimmed with orange-flower blossoms. She wore a wreath of the same, over which was a veil of rich Honiton lace, worn so as not to conceal her face. She wore as jewels the Collar of the Order of the Garter, with a diamond necklace and earrings. The bridesmaids were the Ladies Adelaide Paget, Sarah Villiers, Frances Cowper, Elizabeth West, Mary Grimston, Eleanor Paget, Caroline Lennox, Elizabeth Howard, Ida Hay, Catherine Stanhope, Jane Bouverie, and Mary Howard.

After the conclusion of the marriage rite, the Queen hastily crossed to the opposite side of the altar, and kissed the Queen Dowager, who was standing there. She then took Prince Albert’s hand, and passed down the aisle. On the return to Buckingham Palace, it was observed that the Prince, still retaining the Queen’s hand in his own, whether by accident or design, held it in such a way as to display the wedding-ring, which was more solid than is usual in ordinary weddings. When the Queen had been led into the palace by her husband, it was observed that her morning paleness had entirely passed off, and that she entered her own halls with an open, joyous, and slightly flushed countenance.

After the wedding breakfast the young couple departed, at a quarter before four, for Windsor, amid the cheers of the undiminished multitude. Her Majesty’s travelling dress was a white satin pelisse, trimmed with swansdown, with a white satin bonnet and feather. As the cortÉge passed rapidly up Constitution Hill, the Queen bowed in return to the cheers of her applauding subjects with much earnestness of manner. When the Queen and Prince arrived at Windsor, they found the whole town illuminated, and received a rapturous welcome from the citizens and the Eton boys, all wearing favours.

We shall conclude this chapter, which we shall not desecrate by devoting to any other deity than Hymen, by a brief description of the Queen’s wedding-cake, which, fortunately for our enterprise, we have succeeded in disinterring from the contemporary records. It was described by an eye-witness as consisting of all the most exquisite compounds of all the rich things with which the most expensive cakes can be composed, mingled and mixed together with delightful harmony by the most elaborate science of the confectioner. It weighed 300 pounds, was three yards in circumference, and fourteen inches in depth. On the top was a device of Britannia blessing the bride and bridegroom, who were dressed, somewhat incongruously, in the costume of ancient Rome. At the foot of the bridegroom was the figure of a dog, intended to denote fidelity; at the feet of the Queen a pair of turtle-doves. A host of gamboling Cupids, one of them registering the marriage in a book, and bouquets of white flowers tied with true-lovers’ knots, completed the decorations.