Although the final illness of the late King had been rather brief, William had for some time been in declining health, and the nation had only to hope that his life would be prolonged until his niece, the Princess Victoria, had attained an age which could be regarded as constituting her majority. This had occurred on the 24th of the previous month, when the Princess completed her eighteenth year, which had been declared by Act of Parliament to be sufficient. William IV. was a man of very moderate abilities; but a certain simplicity and geniality of character had secured for him the regard and respect of the people, and had carried him through the revolutionary epoch of the Reform Bill with no great loss of popularity, even at a time when he was supposed to be unfriendly to the measure. For the last two years he had ceased to take any interest in the political tendencies of the day, while discharging the routine duties of his high office with conscientious regularity. Brought up in the midst of totally different ideas, he could not, at his time of life, accommodate himself to the flood of novel principles which had recently set in, and which he was equally unable to accept and powerless to resist. The result was that, as a well-qualified observer records, “he submitted to what he could not help, but evidently with a sense of weariness.”2 In the previous April he had been distressed by the death of his eldest daughter, Lady de Lisle, and of the Duchess-Dowager of Saxe-Meiningen, mother of Queen Adelaide. Great physical prostration ensued shortly afterwards, and by June it was evident that the end could not be far distant. His Majesty was attended by the Queen with the most affectionate devotion; but the weakness steadily increased, and soon reached a fatal termination.
Owing to the state of the King’s health, the Duke of Wellington proposed to dispense with the usual Waterloo Banquet at Apsley House; but on the 17th of June the dying monarch sent a message to the illustrious Field-Marshal, desiring that the occasion should be observed in the customary manner, and wishing the host and guests a pleasant day. On the anniversary of the great battle (the 18th), the Duke transmitted to Windsor, in accordance with the prescribed form, the banner by the presentation of which he held his estates. Lord Muncaster presented it to the King, who, raising himself up, grasped the folds of the flag, and exclaimed, “Ah! that was a glorious day for England!”3 The eulogies pronounced in Parliament on the character of the deceased sovereign may have been somewhat affected by the conventional or official tone inseparable from such utterances; but they probably contain a fair amount of truth, with no more than the usual omissions. The disposition of William IV. was certainly superior to that of his brother George; and the country recognised the difference with the true instinct of a free people.
The Modern Age, in its most distinctive developments, is almost coeval with the reign of his successor. It is true that the Railway service had already begun; but it was still in its infancy when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and had not yet effected any great revolution in the sentiments or habits of society. The Electric Telegraph, though fully born in the brains of scientific speculators, had received no practical application. Steam and machinery had still to achieve some of their greatest triumphs. The Postal system of those days seems barbarian to our modern eyes. The Newspaper Press was an insignificant force compared with what it is at the present day. Education, in the popular sense, hardly existed. Nation with nation held but little intercourse, and the prejudices of Englishmen were scarcely less gross than they had been in the days of Hogarth. Manners were far more coarse and brutal than they are now; the laws were more complicated and uncertain; social order was less secure; the arts had not attained so wide and general a culture; medicine, surgery, chemistry, geology, and other sciences, were less cultivated; taste was less diffused and less instructed; the luxuries, and even the comforts, of domestic life were almost unknown to the poorer classes; and political power was held by only a small proportion of the community. The England of 1837 was so different from the England we now behold, that the “Pickwick Papers,” belonging to that date, require explanatory notes for the benefit of a younger generation. The history of these vast changes—in which the personal character and influence of her Majesty have had no small share—must be of the deepest interest to all thinking men; and it is this history which we propose to relate.
Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, was born at Kensington Palace on the 24th of May, 1819. She is the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III.; and her mother was Victoria Mary Louisa, daughter of his Serene Highness Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The Duke of Kent was the second husband of this lady, who in 1802 had married Charles Louis, Prince of
WEST FRONT OF KENSINGTON PALACE.
Leiningen—an ill-assorted match, productive of no happiness. The second marriage took place in 1818; but the Duke of Kent died in less than two years. Her Majesty’s descent is very illustrious. It may be traced (conjecturally, at least) up to Odoacer, a warlike chief of the Heruli, who, after defeating the forces of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor of the West, in the year 476 of the Christian era, disputed the kingdom of Italy with Theodoric the Ostrogoth. One of the supposed descendants of Odoacer was Boniface, Count of Lucca and Duke of Tuscany, who lived in the early part of the ninth century, and from whom sprang Alberto Azzo II., Marquis of Italy and Lord of Este, who, in the first half of the eleventh century, married Cunegonda, of the House of Guelph, by whom he had Guelph, Duke of Bavaria, the ancestor of the House of Brunswick, and consequently of the present Royal Family of Great Britain, who are called Este-Guelphs. According to some accounts, however, the Guelphs are derived from a younger brother of Odoacer, whose son, Olfigandus, held a command in the army of Belisarius. But in truth
KING WILLIAM IV.
these matters lie beyond verification, and are interesting only as affording a shadowy link between the present and the past.
One of the most famous ancestors of the Duchess of Kent, and therefore of Queen Victoria herself, was Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony in the early years of the sixteenth century, who ranks among the first converts to Protestantism, and who befriended Luther when that great reformer stood in peril of his life. The Prince Consort was likewise descended from the same family, and the Queen’s children are thus doubly connected with one of the most distinguished German houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In later times, various members of the Saxon family have shown their prowess as warriors, or their capacity as rulers; but the father of the Duchess of Kent, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was a man of pacific inclinations and retiring habits, with a taste for the fine arts. The Duke of Kent was remarkable as a generous supporter of popular government—even to an extreme bordering on democratic ideas—at a time when the Court and the ruling classes were fanatically enthusiastic on the Tory side. Tall and striking in aspect, trained to military service, irreproachable in private life, and exact in all his business habits, the Duke of Kent inherited the manly and sedate qualities of his father, George III., while superadding to them a breadth of intellect to which the King himself could advance no claim. As a commander in the British army, his Royal Highness incurred some temporary disfavour by his strictness as a disciplinarian; but this was afterwards removed by the liberal character of his political views. At a banquet, during which he replied to the toast of “The Junior Members of the Royal Family,” he said:—“I am a friend of civil and religious liberty, all the world over. I am an enemy to all religious tests. I am a supporter of a general system of education. All men are my brethren; and I hold that power is delegated only for the benefit of the people. These are the principles of myself, and of my beloved brother, the Duke of Sussex. They are not popular principles just now; that is, they do not conduct to place or office. All the members of the Royal Family do not hold the same principles. For this I do not blame them; but we claim for ourselves the right of thinking and acting as we think best.”
Like some of the other Royal Princes, the Duke of Kent refrained from marriage until after the death of the Princess Charlotte, on the 6th of November, 1817. That ill-fated lady—the only child of the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV.—had been married, on the 2nd of May, 1816, to Prince Leopold, third