No sooner had this function been discharged than the Royal Family made haste to proceed to the Aberdeenshire Highlands, where, on the recommendation of Sir James Clark, Prince Albert had leased the Balmoral estate from the Earl of Aberdeen. Mountain air, at once dry and keen, was, in Clark’s opinion, essential for the health of the Royal Family, and Balmoral was the driest place in Deeside. Nobody has described this romantic retreat better than the Queen herself. From the hill above the house the view, she says, is charming. “To the left you look to the beautiful hills surrounding Lochnagar, and to the right towards Ballater, to the glen or valley along which the Dee winds, with beautiful wooded hills, which reminded us very much of the Thuringian Forest. It was so calm and so solitary, it did one good as one gazed around, and the pure mountain air was most refreshing. All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils. The scenery is wild and yet not desolate; and everything looks much more prosperous and cultivated than at Laggan.”115
The journey northward was made by sea to Aberdeen, and from thence to Balmoral her Majesty met at every stage of the road with the warmest of Highland welcomes. Balmoral has changed much since those days, when it was the loveliest of mountain solitudes. The little whitewashed castle, with its pepper-box turrets, reminded one of the feats of those old Scottish architects who flourished at the period when the baronial wars had ceased, but when the builders had not learnt to adapt their art to peaceful or domestic purposes. It was not till after the fee-simple of the property was bought by the Prince in 1852, that it became transformed and transfigured by “improvements.” The Queen devoted herself to holiday-making after the free and informal fashion that made desolate Ardverikie a terrestrial Paradise. Her winning ways charmed the cottagers and the peasantry, to whom she soon became a veritable Lady Bountiful. As for Prince Albert, sport lightened the anxieties of politics. The vast panorama of mountain, glen, and forest which unfolds itself from the summit of dark Lochnagar invited him to resume the geological studies which in his youth he had pursued with ardour, and the greatest modern master of the science, Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Lyell,116 was his guest and guide. A pleasing and graphic sketch is given by Sir Charles Lyell of the Royal Family in their Highland home. “At Balmoral, the day I went to dine there,” he writes, “Saturday last, I had first a long walk—Sir James Clark and I—with Mr. Birch and his pupil,117 a pleasing, lively boy, whose animated description of the Conjurer, or ‘Wizard of the North,’118 whom they had seen a few days before, was very amusing. ‘He (the Wizard) had cut to pieces mamma’s pocket-handkerchief, then darned it and ironed it, so that it was as entire as ever; he had fired a pistol and caused five or six watches to go through Gibb’s (one of their footmen) head, and all were tied to a chair on Gibb’s other side,’ and so forth; ‘but papa (Prince Albert) knows how all these things are done, and had the watches really gone through Gibb’s head he would hardly have looked so well, though he was confounded.’ Sometimes I walked alone with the child, who asked me the names of plants, and to let him see spiders, &c., through my magnifying-glass; sometimes with the tutor, whom I continue to like the more as I become better acquainted. After our ramble of two hours and a half through some wild scenery, I was sent for to join another party; where I found the Queen, Prince, and Lord John by a deep pool on the river Dee, fishing for trout and salmon. After the Queen had entered the Castle the Prince kept me so long, and we kept one another so late, talking on all kinds of subjects, that a messenger came from her Majesty, saying it was only a quarter of an hour to dinner-time. After the ladies had gone to the drawing-room we had much lively talk, which the Prince promoted greatly, telling some amusing stories himself, and encouraging others by laughing at theirs. Next day I went to church. The prayer for the parish magistracy, Queen, and Royal Family, judges, ministers of religion, Parliament, and the whole nation, was just such as you would have liked, and in excellent taste, with nothing which a Republican, jealous of equality, could, I think, have objected to, and which, I believe, our Sovereign and her husband could thoroughly appreciate the simplicity of. They shoved the box,119 on the end of a long pole, to the Queen and Prince, and maids of honour, as to all the rest of the congregation, and each dropped in their piece of coin. After church I had much conversation alone with Prince Albert, whose mind is in full activity on a variety of grave subjects, while he is invigorating his body with field sports.” Lyell, who was a very observant man, and an astute judge of character, conceived a very high opinion of the Prince from his conversations with him. After his death, according to Sir Theodore Martin, he wrote a long letter to Mr. John Murray, criticising the Prince’s abilities, and expressing his hope that justice would be done to him in an éloge in the Quarterly.
On the 28th of October the Queen and her retinue left Balmoral for Osborne. On the 9th they left Osborne for London, and when crossing the Solent they saw a boat full of women who had relatives on board the Grampus frigate, then coming into Portsmouth after a cruise in the Pacific, capsized in a squall. Prince Albert gave the alarm, and the Queen writes:—“I rushed out of the pavilion, and saw a man sitting on something which proved to be the keel of a boat. The next moment Albert called out in a horrified voice, ‘Oh, dear, there are more!’ which quite overcame me.” Her Majesty stopped her yacht at once. A boat was lowered, and three women—one still alive—were
THE OLD BRIDGE, INVERCAULD.
rescued. But the sea ran so heavily that Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence refused to let the yacht lie to any longer, and the Queen had to yield to his determination to proceed without waiting for the return of the boat. “It was,” she writes, “a dreadful moment too horrible to describe.... It is a terrible thing, and haunts me continually.”
One more triumph over insular prejudice won by the Court during the year of Revolution remains to be recorded. Prince Albert, very soon after his election as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, alarmed the Colleges by indicating that he had no intention of being merely an ornamental official. His first demand to be supplied with a sketch of the plan of academic study at Cambridge was ominous of interference. At Cambridge everything was at this time sacrificed to mathematical studies, and an idea of the state of mind in which University reformers approached the Prince with suggestions may be found in Dr. Whewell’s liberal proposal, that a century should pass before new discoveries could be admitted into the academic curriculum. Nominally philosophy, literature, and science were included in that curriculum, as the
THE VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER PALACE.
table of studies prepared by Dr. Philpott for the Prince showed. But there was no denying the truth of his Royal Highness’s trenchant criticism on this document in his letter to Lord John Russell, in which he said that all the activity in these departments was “on paper,” and even if it had been real, the scheme was incomplete. After a long and laborious correspondence with the best authorities on the subject, the Prince succeeded in persuading the University to thoroughly modernise its course of instruction, and his revised plan of studies was triumphantly carried on the 1st of November, 1848. As Punch in a clever cartoon put it, H.R.H. Field-Marshal Chancellor Prince Albert took the pons asinorum after the manner of Napoleon at Arcola.
As winter drew on, the state of Ireland became increasingly distressful, and the confusion on the Continent more and more ominous. In England some faint signs of reviving trade were discernible, but only just discernible. The death of Lord Melbourne, however, on the 24th of November, painfully affected the Queen, whose affection for her first guide in statecraft had never abated. “Truly and sincerely,” she writes in her Diary, “do I deplore the loss of one who was a most kind and disinterested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was indeed for the first two years and a half of my reign almost the only friend I had, except Stockmar and Lehzen.” Her last letter to the aged Minister, expressed in terms of simple but touching solicitude, according to his sister, Lady Palmerston, did much to lift from his wearied spirit the cloud of melancholy that had settled on it. Melbourne’s character was rather misunderstood, for his whole life was a conceited protest against affectation. He