The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Many other festivities marked the stay of the Queen and Prince Albert at the Rosenau. The 26th of August, the anniversary of the Prince’s birth, was spent in the house where he had first seen the light, and many of the peasants, in gala dress, came to the house with wreaths, nosegays, and hearty congratulations. On the following day, the Royal visitors left the Rosenau with heavy hearts, and proceeded to Reinhardtsbrunn, the scenery surrounding which gave her Majesty the keenest pleasure. Thence they went on to Gotha, and on the following day (August 30th) made an excursion to the Thuringian Forest, the beauties of which are not easily to be matched. In the heart of the forest, a beautiful pavilion, ornamented with branches of fir and interwoven wreaths of flowers and laurels, was found awaiting the distinguished visitors. Here, to the music of a fine band, a great battue of game took place, with the result that fifty-five animals, of which thirty-one were stags, were stretched dead or wounded on the turf. It was a shocking exhibition, and the Queen records in her Journal that none of the gentlemen liked it. Nevertheless, they took part in it, and opinion in England was rather strongly expressed against such a method of emphasising a holiday. The visit to Germany, however, had, on the whole, been most delightful, and when the time came for departure, the Queen could hardly bear to think that she must leave. Gotha was quitted on the 3rd of September, and, on their return journey, the Queen and Prince Albert halted at Eisenach, where the Grand Duke of Weimar took them to the historic castle of Wartburg, where Luther spent many months of seclusion at a period of great danger to himself, and where they were shown, together with the table at which he wrote, and the wedding-ring which he wore, the dark mark upon the wall where he threw his inkstand at a visionary devil. The rest of the journey was rapidly performed; but, before returning to England, the Queen had to pay a second visit to Louis Philippe at the Château d’Eu.

      At Tréport, which they reached on the morning of September 8th, her Majesty and the Prince were received by the French Sovereign. On reaching the Château, they found that one of the rooms had been fitted up, in honour of her Majesty’s former visit, with pictures illustrating what had then happened, with others having reference to the King’s own visit to Windsor, and with portraits by Winterhalter of the Queen and Prince Albert. The whole company of the Opéra Comique had been brought down from Paris, and, in a temporary theatre constructed in the grounds, two lively French operas were performed in the evening. This second visit to Louis Philippe was extremely short, for, on the evening of the next day (September 9th), it came to a close. The King rowed in his barge to the Queen’s yacht, and, while Prince Albert went to show the Prince de Joinville a smaller yacht, called the Fairy, the French monarch entered into conversation with her Majesty and Lord Aberdeen on the subject of the Spanish marriages. “The King,” records Queen Victoria in her Journal, “told Lord Aberdeen, as well as me, he never would hear of Montpensier’s marriage with the Infanta of Spain (which they are in a great fright about in England) until it was no longer a political question, which would be when the Queen is married, and has children. This is very satisfactory.... When Albert came back with Joinville, which was about seven o’clock, the King said he must go; and they all took leave, the King embracing me again and again. We saw and heard the King land. The sun had set, and in a very short while there was the most beautiful moonlight, exquisitely reflected on the water. We walked up and down, and Lord Aberdeen was full of the extreme success of our whole tour, which had gone off charmingly, including this little visit, which had been most successful.” Lord Aberdeen was a Minister very easily satisfied with the promises of foreign Powers; but it must be admitted that, after so specific a statement as that of Louis Philippe with reference to his son, the Duc de Montpensier, it was not easy to suppose that in about a year he would act in direct contradiction of his pledged word. The visit, however, had been paid; the words had been uttered; and on the 10th of September the Queen again reached England, reinvigorated by her tour, and fully satisfied that nothing unpleasant was likely to occur with respect to Spain and France.

      Towards the close of 1845, the whole of England was much disturbed by an unwholesome extension of railway enterprise, which ended in a panic and an alarming crash. Only fifteen years had elapsed since the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which, though not absolutely the first of iron roads, was the earliest to attract general attention. But in that brief period railways had been pushed forward in many directions, and had become the most important means of communication in the country. They appealed to all classes and to all interests, and on Easter Monday, 1844, the system of cheap excursion trips, with return tickets, was added to the other attractions of this method of conveyance. The great landowners did not like the innovation; for in many instances their ancestral parks were cut through by the relentless engineer, and, although the persons so injured received money compensation, there are certain troubles which the guinea will not cure. Those, also, who lived in remote and picturesque districts, disliked to see their solitudes invaded by a smoky engine, a rattling train of carriages, and perhaps a somewhat vulgar and tumultuous crowd. The poet Wordsworth was desperately offended at this desecration of his beloved Lake district; and doubtless many other persons had the same feeling, without being able to express it in the form of an eloquent sonnet. A great deal of allowance must be made for this very natural sentiment; yet the interests of a whole people could not be set aside for any such considerations. The work of constructing railways went on, and for a time the speculations were of a healthy and legitimate character. But in 1844-45 a number of bubble companies arose, which originated in dishonest greed, and had nothing but a swindler’s success for their object. The country seemed to go mad about railways. Every newspaper overflowed with advertisements of new projects;

      THE CASTLE OF THE WARTBURG.

      every beggar thought he was going to be a millionaire. Parliament had but recently taken the control of railways under its supervision; defining the limit of fares, arranging other matters of detail in the interest of the public, and requiring that, before any company could come into operation, it should deposit at the Board of Trade a specific account, accompanied by sketches, plans, and sections of the lines, of the objects which it proposed to effect, and the means by which those objects were to be carried out. The last day on which these accounts could be rendered was November 30th, 1845. It happened to be Sunday—a circumstance overlooked when the arrangement was made; but all day long the proposed schemes came pouring in, and when at length the doors were closed at midnight, those who had arrived too late rang the bell, and, the moment they found an opportunity, flung their plans into the hall, only to see them thrown out again. The total number of railway schemes thus lodged at the Board of Trade, before the end of the closing day, was 788. Many of these were bubble companies, floated by swindling and often poverty-stricken speculators, who found a number of persons simple enough to take shares, and pay money for them. When the crash was imminent, the vagabonds made off with their gains, and the credulous shareholders had to put up with their loss. One of the great leaders of railway

      GEORGE WILSON, CHAIRMAN OF THE ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE.

      enterprise in those days was Mr. George Hudson, a draper of York, with a genius for this kind of speculation, in which he made an enormous fortune. There can be no doubt that the railway enterprise of England was largely advanced by the labours and abilities of this person, who was the chairman of numerous companies; but in a subsequent year it was considered that he had misappropriated a large sum of money, and he was compelled to refund no less a sum than £190,000.

      Since the resumption of office by Sir Robert Peel in 1841, the Free Trade agitation had made immense advances, and one of the most gifted champions of the cause, Mr. John Bright, had first appeared in Parliament during the summer of 1843. It is probable that Mr. Bright understood the whole case for Free Trade as well as Mr. Cobden himself; and, even if his powers of exposition were not so irresistibly logical and lucid as those of his friend, he had a power of passionate, and even poetic, eloquence to which the other made no pretence, and which was equally effective whether on a platform or in the House of Commons. We have already seen that Sir Robert Peel СКАЧАТЬ