When the succession was secured to the issue of George III. by the birth in rapid succession of heirs to the royal dukes, other circumstances arose which again disquieted the loyalty of the British people. It is needless here to refer to the unhappy relations of George IV. and his consort. All that need be said about the scandals associated with the name of Queen Caroline is that even if the king had possessed the virtues of Marcus Aurelius he would not have been justified, in the modern state, in imitating that stoic's philosophic condonation of the diversions of Faustina. However that may be, his influence and character were not of a nature to strengthen the attachment of the people to the throne at a period when the antimonarchical principles of the French Revolution were again running rife in Europe. The storm broke out in France afresh in 1830, before George IV. had been dead a month. The sounds of the Revolution of July, re-echoing across the Channel, encouraged the discontented populace of England, agitating for Reform, to seek the redress of its just grievances by revolutionary means. The sailor-king, William IV., who then succeeded, was, in comparison with

wicks became extinct, when the two sons of the Duke, who fell at Quatre Bras, died. The younger, who succeeded his brother, when he was expelled from his duchy in 1830, lived until 1884. In connection with the possibility of a Bonaparte becoming heir presumptive to the British Crown, it may be noted that the irregular wife of Jerome, whom he married in America when a boy of barely nineteen, and whose marriage was annulled by the Emperor, was received at the English Court, and at the ball given at Brighton for the Princess Charlotte's twenty-first birthday, on January 7, 1817, "the beautiful Mrs Paterson, late Madame Jerome Bonaparte," danced in the royal quadrille. So acute was the alarm felt about the succession to the crown, that, on the death of Princess Charlotte, actuarial calculations were made which presaged the accession of foreigners to the throne in less than twenty-one years. These fears were allayed by the birth, in 1819, of several grandchildren to George III. His sons, the Dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge, all married in the summer of 1818, and all became fathers in the following spring. The Duchess of Clarence's child did not survive its birth, and a second daughter born the next year died in infancy. The Princess Victoria of Kent was born two months after her cousin, Prince George of Cambridge, and three days before the only child of the Duke of Cumberland, who had, however, married three years before his brothers.

his predecessor, beloved by his subjects. But he had no children, and, although not an aged man, was unlikely to live for a long term of years. If, therefore, at his death the sceptre should fall into unpopular or maladroit hands, it seemed not improbable that the revolutionary tendency, once more encouraged by events in France, might develop till it endangered the dynasty.

But the saviour of the monarchical idea in England was already on the spot. A little maiden of eleven summers, learning her lessons and playing her childish games, unconscious of her high destiny, under the shadow of the menaced throne, was fated not only to make that idea a deeply-rooted national sentiment, stronger than it had ever been since the brief years of hopeful enthusiasm after the Restoration of 1660, but also to establish it as a racial creed, which in her lifetime was to consolidate a worldwide empire of which the foundations were as yet barely visible. Happily the Princess Victoria did not become queen till she had attained her legal majority. Had William IV. died before she came of age a regency would have introduced elements into the government of the country which might have complicated the relations of the court and the nation. As it was, the spectacle of a solitary young girl called to reign over a great kingdom at the age of eighteen touched the hearts of the British people

1A testimony to the popularity of William IV. is found in Tom Brown's Schooldays, where among the favourite ballads of the Rugby boys in the early days of his reign were two in praise of "Billy our King." The Princess Lieven, three weeks after his accession, wrote, "The mob adores him," and that agreeable busybody describes the king's enthusiasm for everything British, to the point of dismissing the French cooks on the first day of his reign. Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, during her residence in London, 1812-1834, edited by Lionel G. Robinson.

2 It was not until 1831 that Baroness Lehzen was permitted to let her august little pupil know how near she was to the succession.

as they had rarely been moved before. To find an equally pathetic figure in history, appealing to patriotic imagination and emotion, we must go to Presburg a century before, when another young queen inspired the magnates and deputies of Hungary to unsheathe their swords and to cry: "Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresa."

The young queen stood alone; for excepting her cousin, Prince George, who had just entered the army, and whom we have all known as the veteran Duke of Cambridge, her only associates were her elderly uncles and her middleaged ministers.1 Indeed, her situation was in some respects more difficult than that of Maria Theresa of Austria. For instead of being unanimously supported by the magnates of the land, it was among the upper class, in the first unprotected years of queenship, that she met with the only serious hostility which marred her relations with her subjects during her long reign. It is needless to dwell on these episodes, all the more indefensible, as the class, of which a certain section was wanting in deference to the youthful sovereign, owed its security to her existence, which saved the nation from anarchy. For had this young girl not succeeded to the throne, or after her accession had she died before she became a mother, a catastrophe would have occurred, the consequences of which an Englishman dares not contemplate, though two generations have passed since the danger was conjured.

1 The most juvenile member of the Cabinet was Lord Howick, Secretary at War, who, born in 1802, survived, as Earl Grey, almost as long as his royal mistress, dying in October 1894. "The queen was so alone," is an expression used by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, a close witness of the events of this period, who was born five years before Her Majesty, and was almost the only Englishwoman moving in society in 1837-38 who lived till the coronation of 1902. Although the venerable baroness remembers four coronations, and although "Ingoldsby" has for ever associated her name with the coronation of Queen Victoria, it is a curious fact that she was never present, within Westminster Abbey, at one of them.

The next heir to the throne was Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who, on the death of his brother, William IV., became King of Hanover, by the operation of the Salic Law. There is no need to analyse that prince's character, which made him, of all the sons of George III., the least fitted to be King of Great Britain and Ireland. The most cursory glance at the prints and literature of the day shows what an escape England had, and how well the English people appreciated the peril. A popular woodcut of the period, juxtaposing the scowling features of the heir presumptive and the bright pure face of the maiden queen, who stood between him and the throne, had for its legend, "Look here upon this picture and on this." Such manifestations denoted not merely the sentimental preference of a hopeful people for a fresh young life full of promise to be its central object, over a battered figure of forbidding demeanour. There were graver reasons for dreading the accession of the Duke of Cumberland. That prince was

a reactionary politician of arbitrary and unconciliatory disposition, in violent antagonism with every movement favoured by the great majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles.1 A London journal of the period, in the number describing the coronation of the queen, made the

1 The best witness as to that Prince's attitude towards popular sentiment and opinion in England is the King of Hanover himself. It is well known that he was identified with the Orange party to such an extent that it was believed that an Orange plot was organised to dethrone the young queen and to proclaim him king. But his extreme ideas and his personal character alienated the sympathies even of his partisans in the United Kingdom. In a letter to Croker, of November 30th, 1838, he complains of "the determined neglect of my old political friends, who have cast me off." In the same letter he expounds very openly his political creed: "The first shock we met was in 1828, the repeal of the Corporation and Test Act; this led to the second in the following year, the Catholic Emancipation; and that to our ruin, the Reform Bill." It should be said to the credit of the Duke of Cumberland that he possessed one virtue—that of physical courage. When he was the most unpopular figure in London, he used to ride out unattended, disdaining the insults and menaces which greeted him in the

streets.

B

following reflections on the contingency of his succession. In an article written on the eve of the ceremony, and prompted by "the present universal outburst of loyalty, so very unlike anything evinced upon former occasions," after declaring that "we know of no republicans in this country," " the writer proceeded: "Let those who think that it is a regard for the institution, and not for the person of the sovereign, that ought to inspire our loyalty, ask themselves what would be their sentiments at the present moment if it were for King Ernest, not Queen Victoria, that the Abbey was preparing? The change, however hateful, might There is but a single plank between us

occur to-morrow.

and shipwreck."
"1

Even if the next heir to the crown had not been a person of the character of the King of Hanover, but an enlightened and constitutional prince, as was his next brother, the Duke of Sussex, the Queen's favourite uncle, even then her disappearance would have been a misfortune the extent of which only we who have seen the end of her long reign can calculate. Though the wisdom of ministers and the good sense of the British people had preserved the land from violent revolution, without the life and reign of Queen Victoria the history, not only of England, but of Europe and of civilisation, would have taken a different course. Her throne became a landmark to Europe, to display to other nations the advantage of the

1 Weekly Chronicle, July 1, 1838.-The sentiment here expressed is similar to that of Dr Paley, quoted in a previous footnote. Cf. also W. Bagehot, Biographical Studies: "The king is to be loved; but this theory requires for a real efficiency that the throne be filled by such a person as can be loved. In those times (Regency and reign of George IV.) it was otherwise. . . . There was no loyalty on which suffering workers or an angry middle class could repose. All through the realm there was a miscellaneous agitation, a vague and wandering discontent." It was the achievement of Queen Victoria to make the institution of royalty revered and prized, as well as the person of the sovereign.