Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen (Vol. 1&2). Sarah Tytler
In front of the throne was placed the royal table, extending the whole width of the platform. It was thirty-four feet long and eight wide, and was covered with a cloth of the most exquisite damask, trimmed with gold lace and fringe. The sides and front of the platform were decked with a profusion of the rarest plants and shrubs. The royal table was on a dais above the level of the hall. A large mirror at each side of the throne reflected the gorgeous scene. From the impromptu dais four long tables extended nearly half-way down the hall, where the Lord and Lady Mayoress presided over the company of foreign ambassadors, Cabinet Ministers, nobility, aldermen, and members of the Common Council. The "royal avenue" led up the middle of the hall to the throne, with the tables on each side. The Queen took her seat on the throne; the Lord and Lady Mayoress stood on either side of her Majesty, but were almost immediately bidden be seated at their table.
The company had now time to study the central figure, the cause and culmination of the assembly. Over her pink and silver she wore the riband and order of the Garter, with the George appended. Besides her diamond tiara she had a stomacher of brilliants, and diamond ear-rings. She sat in the middle of a regal company, only two of the others young like herself. To the rest she must have been the child of yesterday; while to each and all she preserved in full the natural relations, and was as much the daughter, niece, and cousin as of old; yet, at the same time, she was every inch the Queen. What a marvel it must have seemed—still more to those who sat near than to those who stood afar. The Queen was supported by the Dukes of Sussex and Cambridge, the Duchesses of Kent, Gloucester, Cambridge, and Sutherland; and there were present her two cousins, Prince George and Princess Augusta Of Cambridge.
After dinner, Non Nobus Domine was sung; and then, preceded by a flourish of trumpets, the common crier advanced to the middle of the hall and said, "The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor gives the health of our most gracious Sovereign, Queen Victoria."
The company simultaneously rose and drank the toast with enthusiasm. "God Save the Queen" was sung, after which her Majesty rose and bowed repeatedly with marked goodwill. … The common crier then shouted, "Her Majesty gives the Lord Mayor and Prosperity to the City of London." Bishop's "When the Wind Blows" was sung. The only other toast was, "The Royal Family," given by the Lord Mayor.
At half-past eight her Majesty's carriage was announced. The weather was unpleasant, the streets were unusually dirty, but a vast crowd once more greeted her. On arriving at the end of Cheapside, she was hailed out of the glimmering illumination and foggy lamplight by "God Save the Queen," again sung by many hundred voices, accompanied by a band of wind instruments, the performance of the Harmonic Society, and the music was followed all the way by enthusiastic cheering. The Baroness Bunsen remarked of such a scene long afterwards, "I was at a loss to conceive how any woman's sides can 'bear the beating of so strong a throb' as must attend the consciousness of being the object of all that excitement, and the centre of attraction for all those eyes. But the Queen has royal strength of nerve." Not so much strength of nerve, we should say, as strength of single-heartedness and simple sense of duty which are their own reward, together with the comparative immunity produced by long habit.
Still it is a little relief to turn from so much State and strain to a brief glimpse of the girl-Queen in something like the privacy of domestic life. In the month of November, 1837, the Attorney-General, Lord Campbell, with his wife, Lady Stratheden, received an invitation to Buckingham Palace, to dine with her Majesty at seven, and one of the guests wrote thus of the entertainment: "I went, and found it exceedingly agreeable, although by no means so grand as dining at Tarvit with Mrs. Rigg. The little Queen was exceedingly kind to me, and said she had heard from the Duchess of Gloucester that I had the most beautiful children in the world. She asked me how many we had, and when she heard seven, seemed rather appalled, considering this a number which she would never be able to reach. She seems in perfect health, and is as merry and playful as a kitten."
Amongst the other innumerable engagements which engrossed every moment of the Queen from the time of her accession, she had been called on to sit for her portrait to many eager artists—among them Hayter and Sir David Wilkie. The last has recorded his impression of her in his manly, unaffected, half-homely words. "Having been accustomed to see the Queen from a child, my reception had a little the air of that of an early acquaintance. She is eminently beautiful, her features nicely formed, her skin smooth, her hair worn close to her face in a most simple way, glossy and clean-looking. Her manner, though trained to act the Sovereign, is yet simple and natural. She has all the decision, thought, and self-possession of a queen of older years, has all the buoyancy of youth, and from the smile to the unrestrained laugh, is a perfect child. While I was there she was sitting to Pistrucci for her coin, and to Hayter for a picture for King Leopold."
The mention of the coin recalls the "image and superscription" on the gold, silver, and copper that passes through our hands daily, which we almost forget to identify with the likeness of the young Queen. About this time also commenced the royal patronage of Landseer, which resulted later in many a family group, in which numerous four-footed favourites had their place. At the exhibition of Landseer's works after his death, the sight of these groups recalled to elderly men and women who had been his early neighbours, the days when a goodly cavalcade of ladies and gentlemen, with their grooms, on horseback, used to sweep past the windows, and the word went that the young Queen was honouring the painter by a visit to his studio.
On the 20th of November the Queen went in State to the House of Lords to open Parliament for the first time, with as great a crowd of members and strangers present as had flocked to witness the prorogation in July. In the course of the month of December the bills were passed which fixed the Queen's income at three hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds a year, and further raised the Duchess of Kent's annuity from twenty-two thousand, which it had been latterly, to thirty thousand a year. On the 23rd of December the Queen went to give her assent to the bills, and thank her Parliament personally, according to old custom on such an occasion. On presenting the bill the Speaker observed that it had been framed in "a liberal and confiding spirit." The Queen simply bowed her acknowledgement.
Lord Melbourne, "with the tears in his eyes," told Lord Campbell that in one of his first interviews with the Queen she had said to him, "My father's debts must be paid." Accordingly the late Duke of Kent's debts were paid by his daughter, in the name of herself and her mother, in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign. In the second year she discharged the debts which the Duchess of Kent had incurred in meeting the innumerable heavy calls made upon her, not only as the widow of one of the Royal Dukes, but as the mother of the future Sovereign.
The summer of 1838 was gay with the preparations for the Queen's coronation. All classes took the greatest interest in it, so that splenetic people pronounced the nation "coronation mad." Long before the event coronation medals were being struck, coronation songs and hymns written, coronation ribands woven. Every ingenious method by which the world could commemorate the joyful season was put in practice. The sentiment was not confined to the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. "Foreigners of various conditions, and from all quarters of Europe, flocked in to behold the inauguration of the maiden monarch of the British Empire. In the Metropolis for some weeks anterior to the event the excitement was extreme. The thousand equipages which thronged the streets, the plumed retainers of the ambassadors, the streams of swarthy strangers, and the incessant din of preparation, which resounded by night as well as by day, along the intended line of the procession, constituted by themselves a scene of no ordinary animation and interest, and sustained the public mind in an unceasing stretch of expectation."
Some disappointment was experienced on the knowledge that the ancient custom of a royal banquet in Westminster Hall on the coronation day was to be dispensed with. But the loss was compensated by a procession—a modification of the old street pageant—on the occasion.
On the morning of the 28th of June the weather was not promising. It was cold for the season, and some rain fell; but the shower ceased, and the day proved fresh and bright, with sunshine gilding the darkest cloud. The Tower artillery awoke the heaviest City sleepers. It is needless to say a great concourse, in every variety of vehicle and on foot, streamed from east to west through the "gravelled" streets, lined with soldiers and policemen, before the barriers were put up. "The earth was alive with men," wrote an enthusiastic spectator; "the habitations in the line of march cast forth their occupants to