[483]An extreme instance of this partiality is described in Warren’sTen Thousand a Year. In 1868 the jurisdiction to decide disputed elections was transferred to the Court of Common Pleas.
[484]John Thomas, first and only Earl of Redesdale (1805–86), Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords, 1851–86. Lord Redesdale was one of the last men in England who wore habitually in the daytime the old-fashioned “tail-coat.”
[485]Lady Catharine was daughter of the third Earl of Radnor, and Victor was her fifth son. Seeante, p. 219.
[486]There is a portrait of the Queen by John Partridge in King George’s room at Buckingham Palace showing the hair done in this fashion.
[487]Charles, second Viscount Townshend, K.G., married Dorothy, sister of Sir Robert Walpole. Townshend was President of the Council 1720, and afterwards Secretary of State. There was jealousy between the brothers-in-law, and Horace Walpole sarcastically observed that things went well or ill according as the style of the firm wasTownshend and WalpoleorWalpole and Townshend.
[488]Henry Francis, fourteenth Baron Teynham (1768–1842).
[489]At the festival of the 14th July, 1790, held in the Champ de Mars he officiated at the altar. It was his last celebration of the Mass.
[490]Prince George of Cambridge.
[491]Sixth son of Lord Anglesey. He was second in command, to Lord Cardigan, of the Light Cavalry Brigade in the Crimea; he subsequently became Inspector of Cavalry, and later M.P. for Beaumaris.
[492]Eldest son of the fifth Earl de la Warr. Seeante, p. 60.
[493]Afterwards sixth Earl Fitzwilliam, K.G., and A.D.C. to the Queen.
[494]She was younger daughter of the second Earl Talbot, and wife of the seventh Marquess of Lothian.
[495]Prince George, born 1819, succeeded his father on the throne of Hanover in 1851. He ultimately suffered from total blindness, caused by swinging a bunch of keys attached to a chain, that struck accidentally one of his eyes. He sided with Austria in 1866 against Prussia, and after Sadowa his kingdom was annexed to Prussia by decree. King George was a Knight of the Garter and Duke of Cumberland. He was a Prince of amiable disposition and simple manners. At his death he was succeeded in the dukedom by his eldest son, who married the younger sister of Queen Alexandra.
[496]According to the Royal Marriages Act, none of the Royal Family can marry without the Sovereign’s consent. Seepost, p. 390.
[497]Lord Mulgrave and Lord Dundas were created respectively Marquis of Normanby and Earl of Zetland, but Lord Barham was not made Earl of Gainsborough till 1841.
[498]Afterwards wife of the eighth Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India.
[499]Son of Lord Duncannon, and grandson of the Earl of Bessborough.
[500]Hon. Charles Augustus Murray. See Vol. II., p. 94.
[501]I.e., Mutiny at the Nore, May 1797.
[502]This is now proved not to have been the case. He suffered from infantile paralysis of one leg which was badly treated and developed into permanent lameness. Miss Chaworth’s words, which were either overheard by or repeated to Byron, were, “Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?” He did see her on more than one occasion in later years.
[503]Her grand-uncle was killed as described by William, fifth Lord Byron, in 1765.
[504]Dr. Goodall. Seeante, p. 119.
[505]The Head Master. Seeante, p. 119.
[506]She was Jane, daughter of the second Marquess Cornwallis and wife of the third Lord Braybrooke.
[507]Son of Duke Charles Bernard and Duchess Ida (a sister of Queen Adelaide). Prince Edward was A.D.C. to Lord Raglan in the Crimea, and ultimately Commander of the Forces in Ireland.
[508]Charles Wood (afterwards Lord Halifax). At this time Secretary to the Admiralty. Seeante, p. 99.
[509]These portraits were among those which by custom were presented to the Headmaster of Eton by certain distinguished Etonians on leaving school. The gift of a portrait was usually made by request. A boy was considered honoured by being asked to leave his portrait to the school. The custom lapsed about forty years since. This collection was recently overhauled by Mr. Lionel Cust. It is now in fine order, carefully arranged in the Provost’s Lodge at Eton. The portraits have been engraved and collected in the form of a sumptuous volume.
[510]This may be the portrait now in the Corridor at Windsor Castle.
[511]W. F. Chambers, Physician-in-Ordinary to King William and Queen Adelaide, and afterwards to Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Kent.
[512]Sir Michael O’Loghlen did not, however, leave the Rolls. The new Chief Baron was Mr. Stephen Woulfe, the Irish Attorney-General.
[513]She married Lord Sandwich (see p. 191) in the following September.
[514]Lady Adelaide Paget (afterwards Lady Adelaide Cadogan). Seeante, p. 319.
[515]The Marriage Act of 1835 made null and void all marriages within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity. Before they had only been voidable.
[516]In this case the two wives werehalfsisters, daughters of the Duke of Wellington’s sister by different husbands.
[517]The Prince Consort was strongly in favour of legalising these marriages, and King Edward (then Prince of Wales) always voted in favour of the Bills introduced for the purpose of amending the law.
[518]This custom has now unfortunately fallen into disuse.
[519]No one has a prescriptive orex officioright to wear the “Windsor uniform.” It is an honour conferred personally by the Sovereign. Of recent Prime Ministers, this privilege has been enjoyed by Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery, and Mr. Balfour.
[520]Sunderland’s Ministry in 1718 introduced a measure to limit the creation of peers, the object being to prevent the Prince of Wales (when King) from swamping the Lords with his partisans. Walpole spoke and wrote vigorously against the Bill, and organised the opposition to it in anticipation of the time when it should reach the Commons. He succeeded in altering the public attitude to the Bill, and it was rejected by a large majority.
[521]After this date, that is to say, the early part of the Queen’s reign, the Order of the Bath began to be somewhat neglected. It was partly owing to the creation of new Orders, such as the Star of India and the St. Michael and George. It has, however, recently been ordained by King George V. that the annual service for the Order of the Bath in Westminster Abbey shall be revived, and the banners and shields of the Knights Grand Cross be affixed to their stalls in Henry VIIth.’s chapel.
[522]Seeante, p. 205.
[523]Sir Peter King, who became Lord Chancellor, was created Lord King of Ockham in 1725. The present baron (eighth holder of the title) had married in 1835, Ada, the only child of Lord Byron. Lord King now became Earl of Lovelace.
[524]Eldest son of the Duke of Leeds, who died in the following month.
[525]In 1847, when the offer was repeated, Lord Melbourne wrote to the Queen that “for a long time he had found himself much straitened in his circumstances” and that “he knows that the expense of accepting the ribbon amounts to £1,000, and there has been of late years no period at which it would not have been seriously inconvenient to him to pay down such a sum.”
[526]With the exception of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Palmerston, no Prime Minister, as such, has accepted the Garter in recent times.
[527]Sir Sotherton Peckham-Micklethwait, of Iridge Place, Sussex. Created a baronet “for a personal service rendered to Her Majesty and the Duchess of Kent at St. Leonards in Nov. 1834.” Seeante, p. 104.
[528]Clarenceux King-of-Arms, afterwards Garter.
[529]Edward Maltby (1770–1859), Bishop of Durham, to which he had been recently translated from Chichester.
[530]The ceremonial as described by the Queen does not compare favourably with those of King Edward or King George, when hardly a mistake was made by any of those officiating. The ritual at the Coronation of King Edward was especially difficult, owing to the age and infirmities of Archbishop Temple.
[531]Lord Surrey was son and heir of the Earl Marshal, the twelfth Duke of Norfolk, whom he succeeded in 1842. He married Charlotte Sophia, daughter of the first Duke of Sutherland.
[532]The Litany was omitted at the Coronation of King Edward VII., and reintroduced at the Coronation of King George V.
[533]The robe is exhibited in the London Museum at Kensington Palace.
[534]Second son of Louis Philippe. He was offered two thrones, Belgium in 1831 and Greece in 1832, but declined both. Seeante, p. 130.
[535]This has been remedied by the recent custom of giving a Viscountcy to any Secretary of State who is raised to the Peerage.
[536]Nicholas, third Baron Audley by writ and tenth by tenure, fought in the wars with France 1359 and 1372. His sister Joan married Sir John Tuchet, killed at Rochelle, 1371, and her grandson succeeded to the title. On the death, in 1872, of the twenty-first Baron (son of George Edward Thicknesse Touchet, twentieth Baron, whom the Queen and Lord Melbourne were discussing), the barony fell into abeyance between his daughters.
[537]Eldest son of the Duke of Sutherland, and nine years old. He succeeded his father as third Duke in 1861.
[538]Eldest son of Lord Conyngham, and thirteen years old. Succeeded as third Marquess in 1876, and died in 1882.
[539]Eldest son of Lord Uxbridge, seventeen years old. Died in 1880.
[540]This was certainly an error of judgment on the part of Lord Melbourne. The Queen’s appearance on horseback, in the uniform still to be seen in the London Museum at Kensington Palace, was extraordinarily fascinating, and added greatly to the interest of any Review at which she appeared.
[541]The Queen evidently did not grasp a name unfamiliar to her. The ratification of the Treaty of Amiens was sent over by Napoleon in charge of Colonel Lauriston, his A.D.C. When this officer left the house of M. Otto in London to deliver his credentials to Lord Hawkesbury, the scene occurred which the Queen here describes. The carriage was accompanied to Downing Street by a guard of honour of the Household Cavalry.
[542]Afterwards first Baron Lyons of Christchurch (1790–1858). At this time Minister Plenipotentiary at Athens. In 1853, war with Russia being imminent, he was appointed second in command of the fleet in the Mediterranean, and displayed boldness and initiative in the attack on the sea defences of Sebastopol. He became Commander-in-Chief in 1855, and, on the termination of the war, a Peer.
[543]The dukedom of Montagu, created in 1766, become extinct at the death of the first Duke in 1790.
[544]In later years Edward Geoffrey, fourteenth Earl of Derby, three times Prime Minister, was reported to have refused a dukedom, on the ground that he would not exchange his Earl’s coronet, which dated from the fifteenth century, for a set of new strawberry leaves.
[545]Lord Melbourne’s private secretary. He afterwards served Prince Albert in a similar capacity. See Vol. II. p. 37.
[546]He was for a timeAttachéto the British Embassy in Paris, and died in 1847.
[547]A lovely portrait of her by Gainsborough is the property of Lord Rothschild at Tring Park.
[548]Lord Seymour bore, by courtesy, the only other title of his father, the Duke of Somerset. So there was not a third title available for the grandson, as is the case in other families of ducal rank.
[549]Thomas Sheridan, actor and lecturer on elocution. Published in 1780 a General Dictionary of the English Language with a special view to teaching pronunciation. A work of phonetic rather than philological value.
[550]Eldest surviving son of the third Marquess of Lansdowne, and afterwards fourth Marquess. The elder brother (Lord Kerry) had died without male issue.
[551]Aunt of Lord Shelburne. She was a daughter of the fourth Earl of Bessborough.
[552]Lord Shelburne married in 1840 Lady Georgina Herbert, daughter of the eleventh Earl of Pembroke. She died in the following year. In 1843 he married the Hon. Emily Elphinstone-de-Flahaut, in her own right Baroness Nairne.
[553]Formerly Lady Cavendish. Her husband had succeeded as second Earl of Burlington in 1834. Seeante, p. 53. She died in 1840.
[554]George, fifth Earl of Essex (1757–1839).
[555]Ladies of unblemished character, retired from the stage, were permitted to appear at Court.
[556]Charles, Earl Grey, the ex-Prime Minister, who rarely came to town at this period of his life, and must have been a novelty for the Queen.
[557]Count Stroganoff was the special representative of the Czar at the Coronation.
[558]His son who died, aged four years, in 1783.
[559]Lady Sarah Lennox, who was a daughter of the second Duke of Richmond, married first, Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, secondly the Hon. George Napier. George III. was undoubtedly much attracted by this lady. By her second marriage she became the “Mother of the Napiers,” a designation almost as famous in the British history of the Napoleonic Wars as the “Mother of the Gracchi” in Republican Rome.
[560]Daughters of John Gunning, of Castle Coote. Seeante, p. 215.
[561]Lord Alfred Paget. Seeante, p. 226.
[562]Seeante, p. 310.
[563]Mehemet Ali, the Pasha, having announced his intention to pay no more tribute to the Porte (an action equivalent to a declaration of independence), great efforts were made by the representatives of the Powers to induce him to reconsider his decision.
[564]The French Ambassador in London.
[565]Baron Heinrich von Bülow, many years Prussian representative in London, afterwards Prussian Minister for Foreign Affairs.
[566]The adjustment of the debt between Holland and Belgium.
[567]The equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington stood on the arch at Hyde Park Corner from 1846 to 1883. It excited much ridicule at the time of its erection. There was a question of its removal, but the Duke of Wellington strongly opposed the suggestion. He said that he never wished his statue to be put upon the Arch, but once there, there it should remain. It was removed nearly forty years later to Aldershot. Recently some prancing horses and a chariot have taken the place of old Copenhagen and the Duke.
[568]As an illustration of the vagaries of “taste” in Art, it may be mentioned that this statue is now considered one of the most successful in London.
[569]This refers to the reading by the Queen of her “Speech.”
[570]All this paragraph refers to the disputes between Belgium and Holland over their respective financial responsibilities.
[571]Afterwards Sir John MacNeill. He had been sent as Envoy to Teheran to try to prevent the Shah attacking the Afghans.
[572]Lord Melbourne was a “low Churchman and an Erastian,” like so many of the Whigs of that day.
[573]This love of straight dealing and dislike of flattery were lifelong characteristics of the Queen.
[574]In 1815 Belgium and Holland were, by the action of the European Powers at the Congress of Vienna, united into one Kingdom. This led to constant friction and even to open hostilities between the two nations, and in 1831 a Conference of the Powers decreed a dissolution of the Union, and drew up a Treaty, but the division of territory again led to a war which is chiefly notable for the siege of Antwerp in 1832. In 1838 Holland announced for the first time her readiness to accede to the provisions of the Treaty of 1832. The Belgians claimed that this acquiescence came too late, but under pressure of the Powers she had in the end to give her assent. During this excitement the failure of the Bank of Brussels produced a financial crisis which caused great distress among the people.
[575]Count von Senfft Pilsach was Austrian Minister at The Hague, and came to England in 1838 as Austrian Plenipotentiary at the Conference which took place in London to settle the Separation of Holland and Belgium. He signed the Treaty of 1839 on behalf of Austria.
[576]Member for Oxford University. He had displaced Sir Robert Peel at the time of the Tory split on Catholic Emancipation.
[577]This was common Whig doctrine up to the Crimean War, when the unreadiness of the Military Authorities caused a reaction, which indirectly led to the fall of the Aberdeen Government.
[578]Wife of Warren Hastings.
[579]Melbourne House stood on the site of the Albany. See Vol. II., p. 96.
[580]In 1771 the Duke of Cumberland secretly married Anne, daughter of Lord Irnham (afterwards Earl of Carhampton) and widow of Andrew Horton. Her brother was Colonel Luttrell, the opponent of Wilkes. Not long afterwards, the Duke of Gloucester made public the fact of his marriage to the Dowager Countess Waldegrave. These two marriages led to the passing of the Royal Marriage Act, which governs (with certain exceptions) the marriages of all descendants of George II. Seeante, p. 333, and Vol. II., p. 43.
[581]Lord Melbourne modified this opinion next day.
[582]Partly in consequence of his intrigues with the Prince of Wales against Pitt in the matter of the Regency Bill.
[583]Brownlow North, Bishop successively of Lichfield, Worcester, and Winchester.
[584]See note,post, p. 397.
[585]Mary, daughter of the first Viscount Galway, married, as his second wife, Edmund, seventh Earl of Cork. She died in 1840.
[586]Remarks on an Article for the “Edinburgh Review” on the Times of George III. and George IV., by General Sir Herbert Taylor, who had been Secretary successively to the Duke of York, George III., Queen Charlotte, and William IV.
[587]A Diary illustrative of the Times of George IV., published in 1838. Seeante, p. 310.
[588]Lady Anne Hamilton was a lady-in-waiting of Caroline, wife of George IV., whom she accompanied to England in 1820.The Secret History of the Courtwas published without her name, but the authorship was never disputed.
[589]Lord Guilford was the son of Lord North, George III.’s Minister, and his sister, here mentioned, was Lady Charlotte Lindsay, wife of Lieut.-Col. Hon. John Lindsay. Seeante, p. 392.
[590]James Kenney (1780–1849), a successful dramatist. He was the original Jeremy Diddler in his ownRaising the Wind, when it was acted by amateurs. The play was subsequently performed at Covent Garden.
[591]Granville Penn (1761–1844), grandson of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
[592]Lady Emmeline Wortley, daughter of the fifth Duke of Rutland, wife of Charles Stuart Wortley. Her daughter, Victoria, goddaughter of the Duchess of Kent, afterwards Lady Welby-Gregory, was sometime a maid-of-honour to the Queen.
[593]Granville, Earl Gower (1721–1803), had sat for Westminster before his accession to the Peerage. Thereafter he was Lord Privy Seal, Lord Chamberlain and President of the Council. He was created Marquess of Stafford, and K.G. He married Lady Louisa Egerton, daughter and co-heiress of Scrope, first Duke of Bridgwater.
Transcriber’s Notes:Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Transcriber’s Notes: