THE QUEEN IN SCOTLAND.

The Session of 1842 was opened by the Queen in person with unusual splendour, which was enhanced by the presence of the King of Prussia, who had come over to stand sponsor to the Prince of Wales. The christening was performed on the 25th of January, and was attended with all due magnificence, and succeeded by a splendid banquet. Mr. Raikes, in his amusing, valuable journal, thus records the event:—

The Queen’s speech of this year noticed with deep regret the continued distress in the manufacturing districts of the country, and bore testimony to the exemplary patience and fortitude with which it had been borne. Many people began once more to murmur at the continued flow of gaiety at Windsor where the young parents still seemed to experience the first thrills of transport at the birth of a son and heir. Some of the lowest class of seditious newspapers began the practice of printing in parallel columns the description of the fancy dresses at the Queen’s balls (the purchase and preparation of which must certainly have tended to alleviate the distress), &c., and reports from the pauperised districts, records of deaths from starvation, and the like. Among the unthinking classes such disloyal practices produced a very deep feeling of dissatisfaction. In the course of the year two attempts were reported as having been made upon the Queen’s life: one, however, being merely the freak of an ill-natured boy, but the other was of a much more serious description, and cost its author transportation for life. Sir Robert Peel felt it his duty to discharge the part of a faithful Minister, and to counsel his Royal mistress to lessen the gaieties of the Court, even if it were only in deference to the prejudices of the starving and maddened poor. He neither roused nor augmented her fears, but gave her the counsel which the time required. The Queen at once acted, and without taking offence, upon the Minister’s advice. At the christening of the Prince of Wales all the ladies of the Court appeared in Paisley shawls, English lace, and other articles of home manufacture. And when the christening was over a marked sobriety settled down over the Court, and continued during all the summer of 1842. Even the most querulous speedily granted that they had no reason to complain.

This change in the sentiments of the public, especially its lower and more distressed portions, was promoted and accelerated by an act, equally tasteful and touching, of Her Majesty during this year. In the spring of 1842, Sir Robert Peel, now thoroughly warm in his seat as Premier, commanding a large working majority, and not yet having awakened the hostility of the decidedly Protectionist section of his followers, inaugurated that splendid series of bravely devised measures in the direction of Free Trade, of which the great Anti-Corn Law Act of four years later was, so far as he was concerned, the culmination. In 1842, Peel proposed and carried a Budget which considerably lessened the burden of Customs imposts, but the chief merit and recommendation of which consisted in the fact that it relieved the nation of the incubus of a host of very galling excise duties on such articles of common use as glass, leather, bricks, and soap. These beneficial remissions of taxation could not have been effected by him—for they entailed a heavy cost upon the revenue, already inadequate to meet the annual expenditure—but for the re-imposition of an Income Tax, a means of raising revenue which had been long disused, to the extent of sevenpence in the pound on all incomes above £150 of annual value. This, of course, did not affect the allowance made to the Sovereign. Nevertheless, Her Majesty evinced her sympathy at once with the prevailing distress and with the daring fiscal expedient of the Premier, by coming forward unsolicited to offer to receive an abatement of her income, based upon the precise scale of that imposed by Parliament upon her subjects.

Up to the Queen’s reign, the members of the House of Brunswick had never been peripatetic in their tendencies. The first two Georges had made frequent visits to their patrimonial German electorate, but they evinced no desire to visit England beyond the immediate environs of London. George III. never passed out of England; George IV. visited Ireland and Scotland each on one occasion; but with these exceptions, hardly any British highways were traversed by his wheels during his reign, whether as Sovereign Regent or Regnant, except the great roads connecting his capital with Windsor, Brighton, and Newmarket. William IV. was too old when he came to the throne to make it at all probable that he would evince any taste to visit any of the outlying portions of his dominions; nor did he do so. Queen Victoria, as we have copiously seen in earlier chapters, was from her very infancy habituated to moving about from place to place, and all along she has proved herself as proud as Queen Elizabeth herself of mingling with and showing herself to her people.

For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they, and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh.

The expected visit was awaited and prepared for in the North with the utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations, burgher vied with noble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a fine coup-d’oeil of romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their illustrious visitors with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though of English birth, was chaunted right lustily by Scottish lungs and lips. It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan.

As she passed up the Firth, under cover of the gathering night, every peak on either side of the estuary, from St. Abb’s Head, which she had left behind, away westwards to the Pentlands, the Lomonds, and the Ochils, was surmounted by a blazing beacon—a splendid sight, and stimulative by contrast to the imaginations of those who recollected to what different uses beacon-fires on Scottish hills and Scottish Border Keeps had been put in earlier days of the international relations of England and Scotland. The fiery welcome was returned from the Royal yacht, by the letting off of rockets, and the burning of blue lights.

At last the squadron came in sight in the roads before Leith, the anchor being let down—“a welcome sound,” wrote the Queen—at a quarter to one o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September the 1st. Every one of the heights on or under the domination of which Edinburgh stands, had been crowded all the previous day with tens of thousands of spectators. All at once two guns from the castle, and a signal flag hoisted from the summit of Nelson’s column, some 400 feet above the level of the sea, announced the arrival. The Queen slept and rested herself after the fatigues of her voyage on board the Royal yacht; and she took her good but inalert subjects by surprise, by effecting her landing at an hour so early on the succeeding morning, that many of them, wearied by their recent vigils, had not yet left their couches, and even the corporate dignitaries were subject to the mortification of not having the honour to receive and welcome their Queen as her foot first touched Scottish soil. In their absence, that pleasurable duty was discharged by Sir Robert Peel, and the Duke of Buccleuch, whose guest she was about to be at his palace of Dalkeith, and who had ridden immediately after her carriage, as Captain-General of her body-guard of Scottish Archers, on the day on which she was crowned queen at Westminster. Sir Robert Peel told the Queen that the people were all in the highest glee and good humour, though a little disappointed at the non-arrival of the squadron the day before, as had been expected.

With the extraordinarily auspicious fatality which has made “Queen’s weather” so trite and proverbial an expression, the sun splendidly burst forth at the moment of her landing, and continued to shine throughout her progress through a portion of the New Town of Edinburgh; its bright freestone streets and terraces sparkling in the clear, sunlit air—past her ancient Palace of Holyrood, and so through fertile Lothian to the mansion of the princely head of the old Border House of the Scotts. When the customary ensign was hauled down from the top of the rugged Castle Rock, and the Royal Standard was hoisted in its place, the streets at once filled, and the loyal shouts of the crowds, who hastily assembled in no small force, sufficiently atoned for the absence of those whom the somewhat unexpected arrival balked for this one day of the delight of expressing their devotion.

The impression which her first view of Edinburgh made upon the Queen was very striking and most favourable. She thought it “beautiful, totally unlike anything else she had seen.” Even Prince Albert, a great traveller while yet in his teens, and who had visited very many great and renowned cities, also said it was unlike anything which he had witnessed. The massive stone buildings, with not a solitary brick used in their construction; the great dorsal fin of the High Street; the magnificent situation of the Castle; the Calton Hill, guarded by mediÆval battlements and crowned by Choragic temples, with the noble back-ground of Arthur’s Seat overtopping the whole, together impressed the youthful tourists as “forming altogether a splendid spectacle.”

As the carriages drove through the city, the Earl of Wemyss, who marched by the Queen’s side in his green uniform of a Scottish Archer of the Guard, pointed out to Her Majesty the varied objects of interest on the line of route through the eastern portions of the city to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palace of Dalkeith. When they got into the open country, she was further astonished to find that not only all the cottages, but even the fences dividing field from field, were also built of stone. The peasants by the wayside were equally objects of curiosity and interest, as they had “quite a different character from England and the English.” The close caps—Scottice, “mutches”—of the old women, and the long, flowing hair, frequently red, of the handsome girls and children, were equal novelties to the royal “Southrons.” The Prince was struck with the resemblance of the country people to Germans. Other Scottish specialties appeared at the breakfast-table at Dalkeith, in the form of oatmeal porridge and “Finnan Haddies”—the first of which, at least, found immediate favour with Her Majesty.

The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved for the Saturday after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain of Buccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood (which the Queen rightly pronounced “a royal-looking old place”) to the Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan’s pedantic Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be surpassed, in any portion of Her Majesty’s dominions.

It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen passed this day. Every one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being most intimately associated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On her way she passed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor, was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed that he was a “saur saunt for the Croon,” she may have seen the blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns. Here was the ancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while immediately beneath her lay the Grassmarket—at once the Tower and the Smithfield of Scotland—where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.

As the cortÈge passed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had passed when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o’er Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have occupied and touched the heart of the youngest and the mightiest monarch in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert pronounced the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as “fairy-like,” “what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture.” He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of “Auld Reekie” (Anglice, “Old Smoky”) into “the Modern Athens.” The Leith ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad, ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives, with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of peculiar interest.

Space fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the Queen’s first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of her oldest nobles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the “garb of Old Gael” still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace, where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the true and special elements of “Highland Welcome.” She may be almost said to have passed through a continuous succession of triumphal arches. Every chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores, and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. Balls, in which the national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the noble houses of whom she was the guest, constituted the chief feature, alternated with deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.

The Queen was especially charmed with the beautiful situation of the ancient city of Perth, and the enthusiastic reception which the multitudes there assembled gave to her. Prince Albert, too, was delighted, and likened the appearance of the place to Basle. At Scone Palace, which is within two miles of Perth, a very natural object of peculiar interest was the mound on which all the Scottish kings had been crowned. At Dunkeld the Highlands were fairly entered; and here the Royal party were met and escorted by a guard of Athole Highlanders, armed with halberts, and headed by a piper. One of them danced the sword dance, with which the travellers were greatly amused, and others of them figured in a reel.

The longest sojourn made in the Highlands was at Taymouth, the seat of the Marquis of Breadalbane. The scenery here again revived recollections of Switzerland in the memory of Prince Albert, who was particularly prone, in this and subsequent visits to the North, to trace resemblances between its scenery and localities which he had visited in the tours of his bachelor days. The reception at Taymouth was magnificent, and quite captivated the illustrious guests. The Queen wrote in her journal—

Wherever the Queen rambled during her stay by the shores of Loch Tay, she was guarded by two Highlanders, and it recalled to her mind “olden times, to see them with their swords drawn.” Walking one day with the Duchess of Norfolk, the Queen and her noble companion met “a fat, good-humoured little woman.” She cut some flowers for the ladies, and the Duchess handed to her some money, saying, “From Her Majesty.” The poor woman was perfectly astounded, but, recovering her wits, came up to the Queen, and said naÏvely that “her people were delighted to see the Queen in Scotland.” Wherever the royal visitors were, or went, the inevitable strains of the bagpipes were heard. They played before the Castle at frequent intervals throughout the day, from breakfast till dinner-time, and invariably when they went in or out of doors. When rowed in boats on the lake, two pipers sat in the bows and played; and the Queen, who had grown “quite fond” of the bagpipes, was reminded of the lines of Scott, with whose poems she had, from an early age, possessed the most intimate familiarity:—

“See the proud pipers in the bow,
And mark the gaudy streamers flow
From their loud chambers down, and sweep
The furrow’d bosom of the deep,
As, rushing through the lake amain,
They plied the ancient Highland strain.”

On the 13th of September the return journey from the Highlands by Stirling, the ancient Castle of which was visited, to Dalkeith Palace, had been completed. Two days later the Queen and Prince re-embarked at Granton, en route for Woolwich and Windsor.

Although a by no means excessive quantity of time—but a fortnight—was consumed in the tour, some idea of the rapidity with which distances were traversed, and the extent of ground covered, may be gathered from the fact that no fewer than 656 post-horses were employed. The Queen touched the hearts of the Highlanders—among whom Jacobitism remained, not as an element of personal devotion to a fallen house, but not the less as a deep chord of pathos and poetry—by commanding a Scottish vocalist, at a concert given in her honour at Blair Athole, to sing two of the most beloved of Jacobite songs—“Cam’ ye by Athole,” and “Wae’s me for Prince Charlie.” When she once more embarked at Granton on her homeward route, she left memories of pleasure and affection which far exceeded the intensely ardent excitement which had preceded and greeted her landing. On the last day which she spent in Scotland, the Queen wrote in her journal—“This is our last day in Scotland; it is really a delightful country, and I am very sorry to leave it.” And the day after, watching its vanishing coast—“As the fair shores of Scotland receded more and more from our view, we felt quite sad that this very pleasant and interesting tour was over; but we shall never forget it.”