1850.] THE HAYNAU INCIDENT. 457 Ministers about details. But when principles were settled at their conferences, she thought she too should be consulted and advised. Palmerston's excuse was the old one-want of time; but he said he was willing to come to the Palace at any moment to Prince Albert, and give any explanations that might be wanted either to the Queen or her husband. If the Prince's account be correct, the Minister seems to have conducted himself throughout this interview with hysterical servility, which may, however, have been simulated. As for his penitence, it was short-lived. In September he had another quarrel with the Queen over the wording of a despatch, in which he had foolishly gone out of his way to impugn the honour of England. This despatch rose out of the Haynau incident. The Austrian General Haynau had come to England on a visit, and the Radicals stirred up public feeling against him on account of his brutality in crushing the Hungarian insurrection, more especially for his cowardly conduct in stripping women, and flogging them publicly. When he went to visit the Brewery of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins, the workmen in the place recognised him. They turned out en masse, assaulted, hustled, and insulted "the Austrian butcher," till he fled in terror from the premises, and took refuge in a little public-house, from which the police smuggled him away. Naturally, Lord Palmerston expressed his regret to the Austrian Ambassador; but it was also necessary to send a formal Note on the subject to the Austrian Government. This Note was a model of Palmerstonian maladroitness. In the first place, it contained an uncalled-for imputation on the English people, because it admitted that they were so incapable of courtesy and self-control that no foreigner was safe in England who happened to be unpopular. Secondly, it implied that Haynau had been imprudent in visiting England at all. The Queen, whose views were shared by the Prime Minister, objected to both of these statements-one as derogatory to the honour of England, the other as needlessly offensive to Austria. But, on her objecting, she discovered that it was impossible to alter the Note, which had been sent to the Austrian Ambassador before the draft had been submitted to her. The Queen, however, insisted on the withdrawal of the Note, and so did Lord John Russell. Palmerston first of all tried to browbeat the Prime Minister by threatening to resign. But when Lord John informed him (16th of October) that the threat was futile, Palmerston submissively withdrew the Note, and substituted for it another drawn up in accordance with the Queen's views. Another serious conflict of opinion between the Queen and Lord Palmerston at this period arose out of the dispute between Denmark and the German States as to the settlement of Schleswig-Holstein. The German population of these Duchies had revolted against the petty tyranny of the Danes, and it was notorious that they were supported secretly by Prussia. The rebellion was suppressed; and though almost all the Liberals of Europe were in favour of letting the Duchies be incorporated in Germany, the Governments of the various Powers took the contrary view. The Austro-Prussian Convention at Olmütz, of 29th November, restoring peace and stipulating for the disarmament of the Duchies, left the matter uncertain; but Austria was obviously for thwarting, whilst Prussia was for gratifying, the aspirations of the German or national party in the Duchies. All through this controversy the Queen was anti-Austrian, and strongly in favour of letting the Schleswig-Holsteiners have their own way. Palmerston, and in this he was powerfully supported by the Tories, was violently pro-Austrian, and used the influence of England as far as possible to prevent the Duchies gravitating to Germany. For the moment he was successful. But subsequent events, as all the world knows, justified the wiser and more liberal views of the Queen. On the 26th of August, 1850, Louis Philippe died; in fact, the sad news of his death greeted the Queen and her husband a few days after their return from a brief visit to the King of the Belgians at Ostend, and marred the celebration of Prince Albert's thirty-first birthday at Osborne. On the 27th of August the Royal Family migrated northwards. The Queen and Prince Albert opened the great railway bridges at Newcastle and Berwick, and then went on to Edinburgh, where they stayed at Holyrood Palace. The reception of the Queen in the "grey metropolis of the North" was picturesque as well as enthusiastic. The Royal Company of Archers in their quaint old costume, headed by the Duke of Buccleuch, claimed their historic right of acting as the Queen's body-guard, and they surrounded her carriage as it drove through swarming crowds from the railway station to the Palace, in which no Queen of Scotland had set foot since Mary Stuart crossed its threshold, never to return to it again. Immediately after her arrival, the Queen and her family began to explore the Palace and its ruined precincts, and she records her delight in her Diary at discovering in the crumbling Abbey the tomb "of Flora Macdonald's mother," not the Flora Macdonald who assisted the Young Pretender to escape, but a lady of the Clanranald family, who was then serving as a Maid of Honour. Next morning the Queen and "the children" drove round the park, and climbed Arthur's Seat, and the Prince proceeded to lay the foundation-stone of the National Gallery of Arts, whilst the rest of the day was spent in sightseeing. At half-past eight on the following morning her Majesty started for Balmoral, which she reached in the afternoon. Here, as Prince Albert says in one of his letters to Stockmar, they tried to strengthen their hearts amid the stillness and solemnity of the mountains,* and truly they had much need of rest. The harassing conflicts with Lord Palmerston, the deaths of Peel, Louis Philippe, Queen Adelaide, the Duke of Cambridge, and the faithful Anson, and the news that the Queen of the Belgians was dying, contributed to produce in the Queen great depression of spirits. The sport on the hills delighted the Prince. The primitive life and Martin's Life of the Prince Consort. 1850.] THE BRAEMAR GATHERING. 459 guileless character of the people vastly interested the Queen, who has left on record her account of several curious excursions she made, and of the gathering of clansmen at Braemar, which she witnessed. Writing on the 12th of September, 1850, her Majesty says in her "Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands," "We lunched early, and then went at half-past two o'clock, with the children and all our party, except Lady Douro, to the Gathering at the Castle of Braemar, as we did last year. The Duffs, Farquharsons, the Leeds's, and those staying with them, and Captain Forbes and forty of his men who had come over from Strath Don, were there. Some of our people were there also. There were the usual games of putting the stone,' 'throwing the hammer' and 'caber,' and racing up the hill of Craig Cheunnich, which was accomplished in less than six minutes and a half; and we were all much pleased to see our gillie Duncan,* who is an active, goodlooking young man, win. He was far before the others the whole way. It is a fearful exertion. Mr. Farquharson brought him up to me afterwards. Eighteen or nineteen started, and it looked very pretty to see them run off in their different coloured kilts, with their white shirts (the jackets or doublets they take off for all the games), and scramble up through the wood, emerging gradually at the edge of it, and climbing the hill. "After this we went into the Castle, and saw some dancing; the prettiest was a reel by Mr. Farquharson's children and some other children, and the • Ghillie Callum,' beautifully danced by John Athole Farquharson, the fourth son. The twelve children were all there, including the baby, who is two years old. "Mama, Charles, and Ernest joined us at Braemar. Mama enjoys it all very much; it is her first visit to Scotland. We left after the dancing." The Court returned to Windsor late in the autumn, and one of the first dismal communications made to her Majesty was that of the death of the Queen of the Belgians on the 11th of October. "Victoria is greatly distressed," writes Prince Albert to Stockmar. "Her aunt was her only confidante and friend. Sex, age, culture, feeling, rank-in all these they were so much on a par, that a relation of unconstrained friendship naturally grew up between them." This friendship, it may be added, survived even the treachery of Queen Louise's father, Louis Philippe, in the matter of the Spanish marriages. The end of the year 1850 was marked by another amazing epidemic of bigotry on the part of the people and the Government, which was very distressing to the serene and evenly balanced minds of the Queen and her husband. This was known as the "Papal Aggression movement," and it is in "One of our keepers since 1851. An excellent, intelligent man, much liked by the Prince. He, like many others, spit blood after running the race up that steep hill in the short space of time, and he has never been so strong since. The running up-hill has in consequence been discontinued. He lives in a cottage at the back of Craig Gowan (commanding a beautiful view) called Robrech, which the Prince built for him."-Note by the Queen in "Leaves from a Journal." these days difficult to understand how a sensible nation could have been swept into its vortex. On the 24th of September the Pope issued a Brief re-establishing the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. In other words, he substituted Bishops and Archbishops deriving their titles from their sees, for the Vicars Apostolic who govern Romish missions in heathen lands. He partitioned England into sees, very much as the Wesleyans had mapped it into circuits and districts. The act was purely one of ecclesiastical administration, and of no concern to any body but the small Roman Catholic community in England. But prominent leaders of the Church began to talk about it in extravagant terms, as if it constituted the spiritual annexation of England to Rome, and as if it were a formal assertion of the authority of the Pope over that of the Queen. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Dr. Wiseman, and Father (afterwards Cardinal) Newman, were particularly indiscreet in their references to the Papal Brief. Dr. Wiseman, for example, issued a pompous Pastoral "Given out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome," on the 7th of October, boasting that "Catholic England had been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished." Dr. Ullathorne, the Bishop of Birmingham, was one of those prelates who had the sense and tact to see what mischief would spring from Cardinal Wiseman's folly, and he did his best to explain the real meaning of the Papal Brief. But his voice was like that of one crying in the wilderness. Did not Father Newman, preaching at Dr. Ullathorne's enthronisation, say that "the people of England, who for so many years have been separated from the see of Rome, are about, of their own free will, to be added to the Holy Church "? Was it not clear, despite the reasonable explanations of Dr. Ullathorne and others, that what the Papists really meant was that the Reformation was now reversed, and that England was reconquered for Rome? Outraged Protestantism, arguing in this fashion, without distinction of party or sect, accordingly rose in its wrath, and hurled angry defiance at the Pope. The bigots, taking advantage of this outburst of popular passion, demanded that the law should step in and punish the insolent priesthood, who thus challenged the prerogatives of the Crown. On the 4th of November, Lord John Russell addressed to the Bishop of Durham a letter almost equalling Cardinal Wiseman's in its folly. The Prime Minister, in fact, gave expression to the worst phase of contemporary excitement, and fully endorsed the ridiculous notion that a prelate, who had but recently been restored to, and even then was kept on, his throne in Rome by foreign bayonets, had established his supremacy over England in a manner inconsistent with the authority of the Queen. This Durham letter further stimulated the frenzy of intolerance into which England plunged. Meetings were held everywhere protesting against Papal aggression, and transmitting loyal addresses to the Queen. Guy Fawkes' Day was celebrated with more |