The Reign of Queen Victoria by Hector Bolitho

Author:Hector Bolitho [Bolitho, Hector]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Historical, Non-Fiction, Royalty
ISBN: 9781432586805
Google: sIA1DQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1432586807
Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC
Published: 2007-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighty-Three – 1861

ON JULY 1, 1862, Princess Alice was married to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, at Osborne. The Queen wrote of it as a “sad marriage.” She shut herself off so that no one in the congregation could see her during the service, and lunched afterwards, with the bride and bridegroom, alone. The fineness of Princess Alice’s heart was revealed in the first letter she wrote her mother, after she arrived in Darmstadt, her new home.

“You tell me to speak to you of my happiness, our happiness. You will understand the feeling which made me silent towards you, my own dear bereaved Mother, on that point. But you are unselfish and loving and can enter into my happiness, though I could never have been the first to tell you how intense it is, when it must draw the painful contrast between your past and present existence...How he loves you, you know, and he will be a good son to you...Take courage, dear Mama, and feel strong in the thought that you require all your moral and physical strength to continue the journey which brings you nearer to Home and to Him. I know how weary you feel, how you long to rest your head on his dear shoulder, to have him to soothe your aching heart...Bear patiently and courageously your heavy burden, and it will lighten imperceptibly as you near him, and God’s love and mercy will support you...”

Some of this courage must have gathered strength, for in September the Queen made her first journey abroad since the Prince Consort’s death. The progress was slow and sad, beginning with Brussels, where Queen Victoria met Princess Alexandra for the first time. She was solaced and pleased; she thought the Princess “looked lovely, in a black dress, nothing in her hair, and curls on either side, which hung over her shoulders, her hair turned back off her beautiful forehead.”[240] Her “whole appearance was one of the greatest charm, combined with simplicity and perfect dignity.”

Six days after meeting Princess Alexandra Queen Victoria went to the Thuringian Valley, bravely facing all the painful associations of Coburg. On September 9, she received a telegram from her son. The day before he had written, “Now I will take a walk with Princess Alexandra in the garden and in three-quarters of an hour I will take her into the grotto, and there I will propose, and I hope it will be to everybody’s satisfaction.”[241] The telegram told the Queen that he had been accepted and that he wished for his mother’s “consent and blessing.”

The Prince hurried to his mother in Coburg. Lady Augusta Bruce was with the Queen and after she had watched the Prince, “too tender and so very, very dear” to his mother, facing her with a letter of twelve pages, “held crumpled up for fear that the zephyrs should blow upon it,” she wrote to her sister that she believed he was truly “in love.”[242]

The slightly cynical mood in which the Prince referred

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