THE WIDOWED QUEEN.

Until 1861 the Queen had never known bereavement in the circle of her own immediate family. Nine children had been born to her, and, although it is understood that certain of her younger offspring do not possess that robustness of health which their elder brothers and sisters enjoy, yet not one had been snatched from their loving parents by the hand of the Great Destroyer. Early in 1861 came the first pang of bereavement. The Duchess of Kent, ripe in years, one of the best of mothers and one of the best of grandmothers, a lady to whose memory all Britons now and hereafter owe an incalculable debt of gratitude, passed peacefully away with her descendants gathered around her bedside.

When the Royal Family returned from Balmoral in October, it was observed that the Prince Consort was not in his usual health and vigour, but he had no pronounced ailment, and nothing approaching to serious alarm was for many weeks apprehended. In the course of the succeeding month he went to Cambridge, to visit the Prince of Wales, who was a student at that University, as he had previously been for a short time at Oxford. He went out shooting while there, got wet, and, as the Duke of Kent had done, was so imprudent as to sit down without removing his wet clothes. Nevertheless, on his return to Windsor, he pursued his usual daily avocations. About the beginning of December he appeared in public with the Queen, and reviewed the volunteer corps raised among the Eton boys. The rain fell fast, and the Prince was seized on the review ground with acute pains in the back. Feverish symptoms supervened, and the doctors ordered confinement to his room. Still no alarm was entertained, and it was believed that he suffered only from a passing malady. The general public knew nothing of the ailment until some solicitude was caused by a bulletin, which appeared in the Court Circular of the 8th December:—

Not until the 13th was any bulletin issued which caused real anxiety and alarm. On the day following, the morning papers contained the ominous announcement that he had “passed a restless night, and the symptoms had assumed an unfavourable character during the day.” The Times, in a leading article, while hoping for the best, startled all by its statement that “the fever which has attacked him is a weakening and wearying malady.” On the morning of Saturday there was a favourable turn, but which was soon followed by a most serious relapse. About four p.m. the fever assumed a malignant typhoid type, and he began to sink with such rapidity that all stimulants failed to check the quick access of weakness. At nine o’clock a telegram was received in the City that the Prince was dying fast, and at a few minutes before eleven all was over. “On Saturday night last,” said one of the daily journals of the succeeding Monday, “at an hour when the shops in the metropolis had hardly closed, when the theatres were delighting thousands of pleasure-seekers, when the markets were thronged with humble buyers seeking to provide for their Sunday requirements, when the foot-passengers yet lingered in the half-emptied streets, allured by the soft air of a calm, clear evening, a family in which the whole interest of this great nation is centred were assembled, less than five-and-twenty miles away, in the Royal residence at Windsor, in the deepest affliction around the death-bed of a beloved husband and father. In the prime of life, without—so to speak—a longer warning than that of forty-eight hours, Prince Albert, the Consort of our Queen, the parent of our future Monarchs, has been stricken down by a short but malignant disorder.” Shortly after midnight, the great bell of St. Paul’s, which is never tolled except upon the death of a member of the Royal Family, boomed the fatal tidings over a district extending, in the quietude of the early Sabbath morn, for miles around the metropolis.

The Queen, the Princess Alice, and the Prince of Wales, who had been hastily summoned from Cambridge, sat with the dying good man until the last. After the closing scene the Queen supported herself nobly, and after a short burst of uncontrollable grief, she is said to have gathered her children around her, and addressed them in the most solemn and affectionate terms. “She declared to her family that, though she felt crushed by the loss of one who had been her companion through life, she knew how much was expected of her, and she accordingly called on her children to give her their assistance, in order that she might do her duty to them and the country.” The Duke of Cambridge and many gentlemen connected with the Court, with six of the Royal children, were present at the Prince’s death. In answer to some one of those present who tenderly offered condolence, the Queen is reported to have said: “I suppose I must not fret too much, for many poor women have to go through the same trial.”

The sad news became generally known in the metropolis and in the great cities of the empire early on Sunday. Unusually large congregations filled the churches and chapels at morning service. “There was a solemn eloquence in the subdued but distinctly perceptible sensation which crept over the congregations in the principal churches when, in the prayer for the Royal family, the Prince Consort’s name was omitted. It was well remarked, if ever the phrase was permissible, it might then be truly said that the name of the departed Prince was truly conspicuous by its absence, for never was the gap that this event has made in our national life, as well as in the domestic happiness of the Palace, more vividly realised than when the name that has mingled so familiarly in our prayers for the last twenty years was, for the first time, left out of our public devotions.” Many thousands of mute pious petitions were specially addressed to Heaven for the bereaved widow and orphans when the prayer of the Litany for “all who are desolate and oppressed” was uttered, and in the chapels of Nonconformists the extemporaneous prayers of the ministers gave articulate expression to the heartfelt orisons of the silent worshippers. Every one thought of and felt for the Queen, and during the week intervening between the death and the funeral, the question on every one’s lips in all places of resort, and where men and women congregated, was, “How will the Queen bear it?”

Prince Albert sleeps the long sleep at Frogmore, to which his mortal remains were borne reverently, and without ostentation, as he himself would have wished. The inscription on his coffin ran thus:—

depositum
Illustrissimi et Celsissimi Alberti,
principis consortis,
ducis saxoniÆ,
de saxe-coburg et gotha principis,
nobilissimi ordinis periscelidis equitis,
augustissimÆ et potentissimÆ victoriÆ reginÆ,
conjugis percarissimi,
obiit die decimo quarto decembris, mdccclxi.
anno Ætatis suÆ xliii.

[Here lies the most illustrious and exalted Albert, Prince Consort, Duke of Saxony, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the most beloved husband of the most august and potent Queen Victoria. He died on the fourteenth day of December, 1861, in the forty-third year of his age.]

Thus died and was buried a great and a good man, one of the most useful men of his age, one to whom England owes much.

“For that he loved our Queen,
And, for her sake, the people of her love,
Few and far distant names shall rank above
His own, where England’s cherish’d names are seen.”

The Queen has ever since her great bereavement most constantly and piously revered the Prince’s memory. Her reverence has taken the practical form of the deepest sympathy with the woes and sorrows of the poorest and humblest of her subjects. She has eschewed the pomp and ceremony of State, and deliberately set herself to discover and soothe sorrow, and to recognise all good deeds of the same character performed by others. When the noble Peabody bestowed his princely act of munificence on the poor of London, no recognition was made of his generosity more signal than that made by the Queen. She has been among the first to help by loving words and by practical aid the sufferers by any great national calamity—a Lancashire famine, a shipwreck or railway accident, a colliery explosion, a catastrophe caused by mad and futile sedition. Ready and sympathetic condolence has especially flowed from her to those bereaved like herself, and when President Lincoln perished at his post, the Queen sent to his widow a long letter which her son described as “the outgushing of a woman’s heartfelt sympathy,” and which, with rare and commendable good taste, has never been exposed to the public eye. Most fitly has she specially commemorated her husband’s memory by the institution of a fit companion and complement to the Victoria Cross, the “Albert Medal,” which is bestowed on brave men who save lives from the “Peril of the Sea or Shipwreck.”

Many consolations have been vouchsafed by Heaven to the widowed Queen. Since she lost her great stay and support her realm has for the most part been prosperous and contented. Though environed by many troubles, and though the clang of battle has shaken the world, the dove of peace has benignantly hovered o’er Britain. Much advance has been made in those fields of social, moral, political, and educational improvement which were so dear to Albert’s heart, as they have always been to her own. And shortly before the period when these pages are first given to the public, the political progress of the nation has received a great stimulus, such as is given in a people’s history only at rare and long intervals. Her children grow up from youth to maturity, and from maturity to maternity and paternity, without a slur upon their fair names, and are, with those to whom the elder of them have united themselves in wedlock, all that a proud mother’s heart could wish. God has stricken her; but He has proved also an Infinite Healer and Solacer. Ours be it to add to the ordinary motives of patriotism, those more tender and touching influences which arise from the recollection that our Queen is now, as said that Queen of England whose subjects were Shakespeare and Bacon, Spenser and Sidney—“Married to her People.”

THE END.

CASSELL, PETTER, AND GALPIN, BELLE SAUVAGE WORKS, LONDON, E.C.