Max O'Rell

Ladies of the Royal Family — Mrs. Christian — Minnie and Alec — The Noble Lord the Poet-Laureate — Wanted an English Academy.

Say to an English Conservative that Gladstone is an old rascal, and Chamberlain a dangerous demagogue, and he will exclaim: “You are right.”

Say to a Liberal that Salisbury is a humbug, Stafford Northcote an old woman, and Randolph Churchill a political gamin, and he will reply: “You have the measure of them.”

But venture to speak jokingly of the Queen, and your Englishman, be he Liberal or Conservative, will fly at you like a bull-dog.

The reason is simple enough.

According to the Conservatives, a Liberal Government never has done, and never will do, anything right.

According to the Liberals, a Conservative Government never accomplished, and never will accomplish, anything but blunders or atrocities.

But in insulting the Queen, who can do nothing wrong, and is thus placed in a position of safety, removed from all party jealousies, you are insulting England, and on this point the Englishman is not to be trifled with; and indeed, be not deceived, this is the very secret of his strength.

Happy the country that has sons ready, when the hour of danger comes, to forget their own quarrels, and rally as one man around her standard!

Go to a theatre, a concert, to the athletic sports of schoolboys, and when the band strikes up “God Save the Queen,” to announce that the entertainment is at an end, you will see every man and boy bare his head, every face grow serious, and, in the midst of this imposing silence, this solemn attitude, you will be struck with admiration and respect for this nation in whom the sound of a monotonous hymn can awaken the deepest feelings of love for the mother-country.

Yet this boundless respect is less an act of homage to the monarchy than to a court, which is untainted by the breath of scandal, and a virtuous Queen who understands the duties of a constitutional sovereign so well, that the best informed statesmen, whether Liberals or Conservatives, declare that they know not to which side her heart leans.

Not that the Queen’s conservatism is not known to be of the strongest kind; but she has always had enough tact, and respect for the convictions of her subjects, to dissimulate her personal sentiments so far, that a statesman may always pretend not to know them without seeming to insult the common sense of his audience.

To read the speeches and decrees of the Queen, studded as they are with the phrase “it is our royal pleasure;” to hear her royal assent given to bills passed by both Houses of Parliament under the formula of La reyne le veult, you would believe yourself in the Middle Ages, or at least in the seventeenth century, under a despotic, absolute monarchy. All these vestiges of old royal prerogatives are carefully preserved in England, but they are merely empty forms: the will of the Queen is not more terrible than the Tower of London, from which you can now emerge as easily as you enter, and more easily too, for you must pay sixpence to go in, and you can come out for nothing at all. If a photograph could sign documents, the Queen’s would replace her quite well.

The royal speeches and decrees are ratified and signed by the Queen, and no doubt she previously reads them or has them read to her, but not one phrase is hers, and if you would form an exact idea of her as a woman, it is not her speeches and decrees that will help you.

In the second volume of the Queen’s “Life in the Highlands,” published this year, you will look in vain for the slightest allusion to politics; it is the journal of a country gentleman’s wife, who takes but small interest in anything outside the family circle. It is the diary of a queen that gives her people but one subject of complaint, which is that they do not see enough of her.

Happy queen! happy nation!

With the exception of table d’hÔte colonels’ widows, and Polish counts, who, in England as in every other country trodden of man, know all the secrets of all the royal families in the world, and will tell you with a mysterious look: “Oh! the Princess of So-and-So? I know on excellent authority that she had to be married in all haste.” Or: “You know that little baby the Countess of ... had the other day? Dear child! it will never know what it owes to His Royal Highness;” with the exception, as I say, of these worthies, you will never hear anyone in England tell you shady stories about one of the ladies of this court, so pure and strict on the subject of conduct, that it is said the Queen will not suffer a woman separated from her husband to be presented to her, even were she a marchioness or a duchess.

It is by setting the example of a pure life; by allowing her people to govern themselves as they think fit; by sympathising in the joys and sorrows of her humblest subjects; by creating bonds of affection between the cottage and the throne, that this Queen, this model mother, has inspired in her subjects a love that is akin to worship.

The Queen’s daughters are artists. One has exhibited at the Royal Academy; another has published some of her sketches in a monthly magazine. You see them constantly visiting picture galleries and painters’ studios.

Their education has been such as a careful middle-class mother would give to her daughters, and everyone knows that at the Swiss Cottage, at Osborne, the young princesses learned to sew and keep house.

In 1866, Princess Alice, the wife of Prince Louis of Hesse, who in 1877 succeeded to the grand-ducal throne of Hesse-Darmstadt, wrote to her mother, the ruler of the greatest empire in the world: “I have made all the summer out walking dresses, seven in number, with paletots for the girls, not embroidered, but entirely made from beginning to end; likewise the new necessary flannel shawls for the expected. I manage all the nursery accounts and everything myself, which gives me plenty to do, as everything increases, and, on account of the house, we must live very economically for these next years.”

The letters of the Princess Alice, in which the house-mother is seen in every line, were published in German a few years ago. Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein has just given them to the world, in English. The letters reveal in all its beauty the character of this Princess, who lavished the care and tenderness of a heart full of filial love upon her father in his last illness, and exactly seventeen years after, fell a victim to the devotion with which she nursed her husband and children through the terrible malady that was raging at the time throughout the Grand-Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt.

I was one day in Soho Bazaar with two or three English ladies. A few steps from us the Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, accompanied by her husband, was making some purchases. After having chosen what she required: “You will send me these things,” she said to the young person who had served her.

——“To what address?”

——“To Buckingham Palace.”

——“What name, madam?”

——“Oh!... Mrs. Christian!” cried the Princess gaily, at the same time glancing at her husband, with an expression that betrayed her enjoyment of the fun of the thing.

Marie Antoinette, the haughtiest of queens, loved to play the shepherdess.

In the month of September, 1883, the Poet Tennyson saw a little of the King of Denmark’s Court. Seated one evening near the young Empress of Russia and her sister the Princess of Wales, he felt ill at ease, not knowing by what title he ought rightly to address those royal ladies: “I do not know,” he said to them, “what I ought to call you?”

“Oh!” cried the charming Princess of Wales, “there is no difficulty: Minnie and Alec, to be sure!”

The Princess’s name is Alexandra, and that of the Empress of Russia Marie Fedorovna.

Surely this was a very pretty answer, and such as one would expect from the Princess en vacances. Poor Tennyson! Mr. Gladstone has raised him to the peerage. The Poet Laureate of England has consented to change his glorious name into that of Lord Tennyson. For a long while, the news was treated by the republic of letters as a hoax or a poor joke; but, alas! the report was only too true. The graceful Saxon bard, who has so sweetly sung of King Arthur and his knights of the Round-Table, takes his seat in the House of Lords, just like Mr. Guinness, the manufacturer of double stout. Ah! quel honneur, Monsieur le SÉnateur!

It is a very shabby trick Mr. Gladstone has played him.

The word esquire seemed quite ridiculous enough after the two names: Alfred Tennyson; but Lord Tennyson! No, it is almost too much for one’s ears.

Where is the Frenchman who says Monsieur Victor Hugo in speaking of our immortal poet? And yet imagine, if you can, something still more unseemly, fancy he had to be called Monsieur le baron Victor Hugo, and you will be able to form an idea of the public feeling here, when it was known that Tennyson was going, of his own free will, to stick the title of Lord in front of his name.

No one ever thought of reproaching Lord Byron for being titled: it was an accident; he was but eleven years old when he inherited the title and property of his great uncle. It is said that he wept for joy on learning the honour that the accident of birth had conferred upon him. What bitter tears Tennyson must have shed upon seeing himself, at the close of his brilliant career, the noble lord the Poet Laureate! It is a perfect suicide.

There was, too, in the genealogy of Alfred Tennyson wherewith to satisfy the most ardent craving for distinction: among his ancestors are to be found princes, kings, and even saints.

The Laureate’s descent from John Savage, Earl Rivers, implies descent from the first three Edwards, Henry III., John, the first two Henrys, William the Conqueror, Edmund Ironsides, Ethelred, Edgar, Edmund I., Edward the Elder, Alfred, Ethelwulf, and Egbert: then Edward III., being the son of Isabelle, daughter of Philip the Fair, one may count Saint Louis, Philip-Augustus, and Hugh Capet, among the Laureate’s ancestors. And these are not all. The St. James’s Gazette, which a short while ago gave the entire genealogy, showed that to the above names might be added those of Ferdinand III., King of Castile and Leon, canonised by Pope Clement X., the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and several Scottish kings.

This is a grand array of noble names, or I am no judge. What can have demoralised the descendant of such men?

Was it the voyage to Denmark?

Could it be a visit to the Court of Copenhagen, at a time when the Czar of all the Russias, the Czarina, and the Princess of Wales were there? Surely, even that was not enough to turn the head of the most illustrious son of Albion.

What is Lord Tennyson going to do in the House of Lords? Will he vote, he who has never mixed in politics, except perhaps when he was about twenty (a long time ago), and the tone of his writings was decidedly Radical? His presence in this august and venerable assembly will prove once more that it is of no use looking upon the House of Lords as a serious legislative body.

But, alas! England has no National Academy. Almost the only rewards she has to offer a man of genius are a pension, a seat in the House of Lords, or a corner at Madame Tussaud’s.