Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen (Vol. 1&2). Sarah Tytler
united circle was to be broken, and a dear face permanently withdrawn from the group. The Duchess of Kent's elder daughter, Princess Victoria's only sister, was about to marry. It was the most natural and the happiest course, above all when the Princess Feodora wedded worthily—how worthily let the subsequent testimony of the Queen and the Prince Consort prove. It was given at the time of the Prince of Hohenlohe's death, thirty-two years afterwards, in 1860.
The Queen wrote to her own and her sister's uncle, the King of the Belgians, in reference to the Prince of Hohenlohe: "A better, more thoroughly straightforward, upright, and excellent man, with a more unblemished character, or a more really devoted and faithful husband, never existed."
The Prince Consort's opinion of his brother-in-law is to be found in a letter to the Princess William of Prussia: "Poor Ernest Hohenlohe is a great loss. Though he was not a man of great powers of mind, capable of taking comprehensive views of the world, still he was a great character—that is to say, a thoroughly good, noble, spotless, and honourable man, which in these days forms a better title to be recognised as great than do craftiness, Machiavellism, and grasping ambition."
At the time of his marriage the Prince of Hohenlohe was in the prime of manhood, thirty-two years of age.
But the marriage meant the Princess Feodora's return to Germany and her separation from the other members of her family, with the exception of her brother, brought up in his own country. The bride, whom we hear of afterwards as a true and tender woman, was then a sweet maiden of twenty, whose absence must have made a great blank to her mother and sister. Happily for the latter, she was too young to realise in the agreeable excitement of the moment what a deprivation remained in store for her. There were eleven years between the sisters. This was enough difference to mingle a motherly, protecting element with the elder sister's pride and fondness, and to lead the younger, whose fortunes were so much higher, but who was unaware of the fact, to look up with affectionate faith and trust to the grown-up companion, in one sense on a level with the child, in another with so much more knowledge and independence.
It was a German marriage, both bride and bridegroom being German, though the bride had been nine years—the difference between a child and a woman—in England, and though the event occurred in an English household. Whether the myrtle was worn for the orange-blossoms, or any of the other pretty German wedding customs imported, we cannot tell. Anyhow, the ordinary peaceful simplicity of the palace was replaced by much bustle and grandeur on that February morning, the modest forerunner of another February morning in another palace, when a young Queen plighted her troth.
The royal family in England, with two exceptions, were at Kensington Palace to do honour to the marriage. The absent members were the King and Princess Augusta—the latter of whom was at Brighton. The company arrived soon after two o'clock, and consisted of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Princess Sophia, the Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, and Prince Leopold.
At three o'clock the party walked in procession to the great saloon adjoining the vestibule, in which a temporary altar had been fitted up. The bride was given away by the Duke of Clarence. The ceremony was performed in the simple Lutheran fashion by a simple Lutheran pastor, Dr. Kuper, "the chaplain of the Royal German Chapel."
Then came the parting, and the quiet palace-home was stiller and shadier than ever, when the gracious maidenly presence had gone, when the opening rose was plucked from the parent stem, and only the bud left.
In 1830 George IV. died, and William, Duke of Clarence, succeeded to the throne as King William IV. That summer was the last of the Princess's ignorance of her prospects; until then not even the shadow of a throne had been projected across the sunshiny path of the happy girl of eleven. She was with her mother in one of the fairest scenes in England—Malvern. The little town with its old Priory among the Worcester hills, looks down on the plain of Worcester, the field of a great English battle.
A dim recollection of the Duchess and the Princess is still preserved at Malvern—how pleasant and kind they were to all, how good to the poor; how the future Queen rode on a donkey like any other young girl at Malvern—like poor Marie Antoinette in the forest glades of Compiegne and Fontainebleau half a century earlier, when she was only four years older, although already Dauphiness of France. The shadowy records do not tell us much more; we are left to form our own conclusions whether the Queen anticipated her later ascents of Scotch and Swiss mountains by juvenile scrambles amongst the Worcester hills; whether she stood on the top of the Worcester or Hereford Beacon; or whether these were considered too dangerous and masculine exploits for a princess of tender years, growing up to inherit a throne? She could hardly fail to enter the Wytche, the strange natural gap between Worcestershire and Herefordshire, by which, at one step, the wayfarer leaves wooded England behind, and stands face to face with a pastoral corner of Wales; or to drive along the mile-long common of Barnard's Green, with the geese, and the hay-stacks, and the little cottages on either side, and always in front the steep ridge of hills with the grey Priory where Piers Plowman saw his vision, nestling at their feet; or to pull the heather and the wild strawberries in Cowleigh Park, from which every vestige of its great house has departed. She might have been a privileged visitor at Madresfield, where some say Charles II. slept the night before the battle of Worcester, and where there is a relic that would better become Kensington, in a quilt which Queen Anne and Duchess Sarah embroidered together in silks in the days of their fast friendship.
As it was part of the Princess's good education to be enlightened, as far as possible, with regard to the how and why of arts and manufactures, we make no question she was carried to Worcester, not only to see the cathedral, but to have the potteries exhibited to her. There was a great deal for the ingenuous mind of a royal pupil to see, learn, and enjoy in Worcester and Warwickshire—for she was also at Guy's Cliff and Kenilworth.
It had become clear to the world without that the succession rested with the Duke of Kent's daughter. Long before, the Duchess of Clarence had written to her sister-in-law in a tender, generous struggle with her sorrow: "My children are dead, but yours lives, and she is mine too." As the direct heir to the crown, the Princess Victoria became a person of great importance, a source of serious consideration alike to the Government and to her future subjects. The result, in 1830, was a well-deserved if somewhat long-delayed testimony to the merits of the Duchess of Kent, which must have given honest satisfaction not only at Kensington, but at Claremont—to whose master the Belgian Revolution was opening up the prospect of a kingdom more stable than that of Greece, for which Prince Leopold had been mentioned. Away in the Duchess's native Coburg, too, the congratulations were sincere and hearty.
The English Parliament had not only formally recognised the Princess as the next heir and increased the Duchess's income to ten thousand a year, so relieving her from some of her difficulties; it had, with express and flattering reference to the admirable manner in which she had until then discharged the trust that her husband had confided to her, appointed her Regent in the event of King William's death while the Princess was still a minor. In this appointment the Duchess was preferred to the Duke of Cumberland. He had become the next royal Duke in the order of descent, but had failed to inspire confidence in his countrymen. In fact he was in England the most uniformly and universally unpopular of all George III.'s sons. There was even a wild rumour that he was seeking, against right and reason, to form a party which should attempt to revive the Salic law and aim at setting aside the Princess and placing Prince George of Cumberland on the throne of England as well as on that of Hanover.
The Princess had reached the age of twelve, and it was judged advisable, after her position had been thus acknowledged, that she herself should be made acquainted with it. The story—the authenticity of which is established beyond question—is preserved in a letter from the Queen's former governess, Baroness Lehzen, which her Majesty has, given to the world.
"I ask your Majesty's leave to cite some remarkable words of your Majesty when only twelve years old, while the Regency Bill was in progress. I then said to the Duchess of Kent, that now, for the first time, your Majesty ought to know your place in the succession. Her Royal Highness agreed with me, and I put the genealogical table into the historical book. When Mr. Davys (the Queen's instructor, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough) was gone, the Princess Victoria opened the book again, as usual, and seeing