Queen Victoria: Her Life and Reign by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, queen victoria, england, english, monarchy, queen, kings and queens, biography
ISBN: 9781781667163
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII.

Marriage of the Princess Royal - Carriage Accident - Twenty-first

Anniversary of Wedding-day - Death of the Prince-Consort.

Meanwhile a domestic incident had made a great change in the royal family. The Princess Royal had become engaged to Prince Frederick-William of Prussia (for three months Emperor of Germany), and the marriage came off on the 25th of January 1858. It was the first break in the home circle. The Queen recorded it in her diary as 'the second most eventful day in my life as regards feelings.' Before the wedding, the Queen and her daughter were photographed together, but the Queen 'trembled so, that her likeness came out indistinct.' The correspondence between the mother and her daughter began and continued, close and confidential, full of trusting affection and solicitous wisdom.

On November 9, 1858, the Prince of Wales celebrated his eighteenth birthday. Mr Greville in his journal tells us that on that occasion the Queen wrote her son 'one of the most admirable letters that ever were penned.' She told him that he may have thought the rule they adopted for his education a severe one, but that his welfare was their only object, and well knowing to what seductions of flattery he would eventually be exposed, they wished to prepare and strengthen his mind against them; that he must now consider himself his own master, and that they should never intrude any advice upon him, although always ready to counsel him whenever he thought fit to attend. This was a very long letter, which the prince received with a feeling that proved the wisdom which dictated it.

In 1860, while travelling with the Queen in Germany, the Prince-Consort met with a severe carriage accident, his comparative escape from which left the Queen full of happy thanksgiving, though, as she herself says, 'when she feels most deeply, she always appears calmest.' But, she added, she 'could not rest without doing something to mark permanently her feelings. In times of old,' she considered, 'a church or a monument would probably have been erected on the spot.' But her desire was to do something which might benefit her fellow-creatures.

The outgrowth of this true impulse of the Queen's was the establishment of the 'Victoria Stift' at Coburg, whereby sums of money are applied in apprenticing worthy young men or in purchasing tools for them, and in giving dowries to deserving young women or otherwise settling them in life.

In the course of the same year the Queen's second daughter, Princess Alice, afterwards the friend and companion of her mother's first days of widowhood, was betrothed to Prince Louis of Hesse. In February 1861, the Queen and the Prince-Consort kept the twenty-first anniversary of their wedding-day - 'a day which has brought us,' says the Queen, 'and I may say, to the world at large, such incalculable blessings. Very few can say with me,' she adds, 'that their husband at the end of twenty-one years is not only full of the friendship, kindness, and affection which a truly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.