1857.] THE GRANT TO THE PRINCESS ROYAL. 741 heartily did they laugh when he explained how the Queen had recently been forced to bear very large expenses of a public nature, alluding particularly to the visit to the Emperor Napoleon-"a visit," said Sir George, solemnly, "which was purely for public and State purposes, and not for her individual pleasure." * No doubt the visits of George IV. to Hanover, Ireland, and Scotland were paid for by the State. But it was as ridiculous to cite such a bad precedent as as that, as to go back for others to the reign of George III., when Parliament at different times voted a total sum of £3,297,000 to pay the debts of the Royal Family. The truth is, that the Sovereign cannot be held exempt from the ordinary liabilities of exalted rank and station. Every person who accepts a high public office is in the habit, now and then, of drawing on his private income to enable him to discharge his public duties with greater efficiency in fact, this liability is simply one of the incidents of great estate in every aristocratic country. But, unfortunately, the Queen had on her accession surrendered her Crown revenues to Parliament for a fixed annuity, on the more or less formal understanding that Parliament would provide for her children when they settled in life. So that the House of Commons felt there was really no choice in the matter, save to vote the grant, and if possible, out of respect for the Queen, vote it unanimously. THE HASTINGS CHANTRY, ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, WINDSOR. * As to precedents, the eldest daughter of George II. received a dowry of £80,000, and an annuity of £5,000. But when the Princess Royal, daughter of George III., married, she was voted a dowry of £80,000 without any annuity. The Irish Parliament had to vote her an annuity of £5,000. Mr. Roebuck withdrew his opposition, but on the report of the vote in Supply, Mr. Coningham, Member for Brighton, entered a protest against the principle of voting annuities to the Royal Family, and moved the reduction of the vote in this instance from £8,000 to £6,000 a year. The motion was lost by 328 to 14. Mr. Maguire and Sir J. Trelawny, supported by Mr. Coningham, then argued that the annuity was enough, and moved that there be no dowry granted. They were beaten by a vote of 361 to 18, and here the matter ended. "We have," writes Prince Albert to Stockmar, "established a good precedent, not merely for the grant itself, but for the way and manner in which such grants should be dealt with." This opinion he would perhaps have recast had he lived to see the painful position in which the Royal Family haye again and again been placed by repeated applications of the precedent. Just before the Court left Osborne, the Grand Duke Constantine paid the Queen his long expected visit. He arrived on the 30th and left next night, after going with her Majesty to see the fleet at Spithead. His visit was not quite a pleasant one for the Queen and Lord Palmerston. The Grand Duke, to their surprise, spoke with almost cynical candour of the Crimean War; indeed, it was not till his visit that the Queen had brought home to her effectually the murderous mistakes of that campaign. He told her about Menschikoff's blundering, and showed her how Sebastopol was at the mercy of the Allies after the Battle of the Alma, because there were only two battalions in the city; and further indulged in many cheering reminiscences of a similar sort, especially in reference to the attacks on the Redan. But as he had just come from Paris, one wonders if he told his English .hosts how it was that the Emperor discovered that the Malakoff was the weak point in the defences of the town.t On the 3rd of June the Court returned to Windsor, and the Queen went to Ascot Races, and admired the beautiful mare, Blink Bonny, which was brought out for her inspection. The first Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, however, provided a stronger attraction than Ascot for the Queen and her husband, and her visit to it is described in glowing terms by contemporary chroniclers. It was the precursor of these great festivals which have since become world-famous, and on the 17th, when the Queen was present, Judas Maccabæus was given by 2,500 performers. * Martin's Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. LXXVI. In the "Journal de Goncourt: Mémoires des la Vie Littéraire," published in 1877, the secret history of the Emperor's instructions to Pélissier is told. The Prussian Military Attaché at St. Petersburg sent to the King of Prussia, through MM. de Gerlach and Niebuhr, the secret details of the campaign. Manteufel, the King's Foreign Minister, desirous of possessing this information which the King kept to himself, bribed certain persons who had access to these letters to copy them. Then the French hearing of the matter bribed Manteufel's agents to let them have copies also. In this way Napoleon III. discovered that the Malakoff was the one vulnerable point in the defences, although the repulse of the 18th of June made most people think it was invulnerable. This year the great race at Ascot-that for the Gold Cup, which, by the way, was of silver--was won by Lord Zetland's "Skirmisher." 1857.1 PRINCE ALBERT'S TITLE. 743 The christening of the Princess Beatrice took place in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on the 16th of June, and among the visitors and guests the Archduke Maximilian of Austria was one of the most prominent. He had become betrothed to the Princess Charlotte of Belgium, a young and beautiful princess, to whom the Queen was deeply attached. It was a love match, but the lives of the young people, radiant at the outset with sunshine, were darkened at the end by the gloom of an awful tragedy. In an evil moment the Archduke permitted the French Emperor to lure him into his wild project for establishing a Transatlantic-Latin Empire as a counterpoise to the AngloSaxon Republic of the West. He was crowned Emperor of Mexico in 1863, and deposed and shot by order of the President of the Mexican Republic in 1867. His unhappy consort passed the rest of her existence in the living death of insanity. On the 25th of June the Queen conferred on her husband, by Royal Letters Patent, the title of Prince Consort, which, however, had already been given to him by the people, who never called him anything else. Still it had been a popular, not a legal title, and Prince Albert could claim no other precedence than what was accorded to him by courtesy. Moreover, when he went abroad, although he held a kingly position in England, he ranked merely as a younger Prince of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and foreigners raised difficulties about the precedence that should be given to him. "I should have preferred its being done by Act of Parliament," wrote the Queen to King Leopold, in reference to the legalising of the new title, "and so it may still be at some future period; but it was thought better on the whole to do it now in this simple way "—namely, by Letters Patent. On the 26th, her Majesty presided over one of the most interesting functions of her reign-the first distribution of the Victoria Cross, or Cross of Valour, to the men who had earned it by personal prowess in war. It is a curious fact that till this period no English sovereign ever decorated an Englishman for being brave. Courage in England is so common and cheap, said Mr. Bright once, that it can be bought easily for less than a shilling a day. Nay, there were some generals, like Colin Campbell, who objected strongly to decorations being conferred for valour-because, as Campbell said, you might as well decorate a woman for being chaste as an English soldier for being brave.* But contact with the French Army had altered the old-fashioned English ideas on the subject, * A story used to be told of one Scottish regiment that got into sad disgrace because of the contempt with which they treated the Cross of Valour. A goodly number of Crosses were allotted to it, for it had won exceptional distinction. The superior officers, on being asked to nominate recipients, said, "Oh, hand the thing over to the subalterns." The subalterns said, "The sergeants would probably like to have the decorations at their disposal." The sergeants said, "Oh, it would be best to let the men get them," and the men, with grim humour, selected as bravest of the brave, two pioneers, whose duty it had been to go round with the "grey beards" when the regiment was in action, and serve out the regulation ration of whisky or rum, as the case might be. Was this the reason why no member of the Scottish Brigade figures in the Annual Register's list of Victoria Crosses given in 1857? and the spectacle of private soldiers in the Crimea wearing the Legion of Honour on their breasts had created a feeling in favour of some kind of decoration which would be open to all ranks of the army. The Order of the Bath could not be granted for mere bravery-it was granted for bravery combined with exceptional skill and talent. But then, as the private soldier had no chance of displaying any quality in war save courage, it was obvious that the new Order must seek a basis in individual heroism alone. The Queen, struck by the episodical incidents of the Crimean War, was strongly of opinion in 1856 that exceptional deeds of personal valour should have more distinctive recognition than the war medal which every man received, however slight might have been his share in the campaign. In that year, therefore, she instituted, by the Royal Warrant of January 29th, 1856, the Order of the Victoria Cross. The decoration was to be given to soldiers or sailors who had performed some signal act of valour or devotion to their country in face of the enemy and a small pension of £10 a year was to be attached to the Cross. It was not until late in 1857 that a list of persons qualified for admission to the Order could be drawn up, and when it was submitted to the Queen she Public interest in the cereearly hour crowds of well resolved to decorate them with her own hands. mony on the 26th of June was intense. At an dressed sightseers swarmed into Hyde Park, where a vast amphitheatre of seats, capable of accommodating 12,000 persons had been erected. In the centre stood a simple table, on which were laid the bronze Maltese crossestheir red and blue ribbons being the only patches of colour that caught the eye. In front, a body of 4,000 troops, consisting of the corps d'élite of the armyGuards, Highlanders, Royal Marines, the Rifle Brigade, Enniskillens, and Hussars, Artillery and Engineers-was drawn up. Between them and the Royal Pavilion stood the small group of heroes-sixty-two in number-who were to be decorated. At 10 a.m. the Queen, the Prince Consort, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and a brilliant train, rode into the Park. The Queen, mounted on a gallant and spirited roan, and wearing a scarlet jacket, black skirt, and plumed hat, rode up to the table, but did not dismount. One by one each hero was summoned to her presence, and bending from her saddle, her Majesty |