234 DEATH OF QUEEN ADELAIDE. 1849 not repine. Though we daily expected this sad event, yet it came as suddenly, when it did come, as if she had never been ill, and I can hardly realise the truth now. You know how very kind she was at all times to me, and how admirably she behaved from the time the King died. She was truly motherly in her kindness to us and to our children, and it always made her happy to be with us, and to see us! She is a great loss to us both, and an irreparable one to hundreds and hundreds. She is universally regretted, and the feeling shown is very gratifying. Her last moments were, thank God, very peaceful, and it was hardly an hour before she died that they perceived the approaching end. She spoke half an hour before, and knew those around her. 'Poor Mama is very much cut up by this sad event, and to her the Queen is a very great and serious loss. The dear Queen has left the most affecting directions (written eight years ago) for her funeral, which she wishes should be as private as possible. She wishes her coffin to be carried by sailors,-a most touching tribute to her husband's memory, and to the Navy, to which she was so much attached!' A few days brought to the Queen a letter from her sister, the Princess Hohenlohe, then at Baden-a letter which was the echo of her own sentiments of gratitude and affection towards Queen Adelaide. 'What you say,' it bore, is most true: she has left behind her love, respect, and gratitude, and she was ever ready to go to her place of eternal rest, where she will find that happiness which she never knew here. . . . Let us think of her bliss after this life of suffering, which she spent in doing good to thousands, who will bless her memory. . . . Let her life be an example to us!' Such and so dear was this good Queen to those who knew 1849 HER CHARACTER. 235 her best. There was a daily beauty in her life,' which impressed all who had eyes to see, and hearts to feel. Yet even this nature, so devoted, so pure, so void of blame, which was a living rebuke to the frivolity or worse of those who hatch and propagate the impure gossip, which is always more or less current in certain circles of so-called 'society,' was not spared by its prurient malice, while she lived, and has not escaped the more cowardly shafts of posthumous slander. CHAPTER XXXVI. In the aspect of Europe at the close of 1849, there was little to cheer the political observer. The storm of revolution had been quelled, but it had left many wrecks behind it, many burning animosities, many baffled aspirations, in which the elements of brooding disquiet and ultimate conflict were plainly visible. Of the momentous problems, social and political, which it had brought to the front, none had in truth been solved. The cause of order had, no doubt, triumphed. In England and Belgium, this triumph was due to the perfect accord between the people and the Government. But of which of the other great kingdoms of Europe could this be said? If they were tranquil, the tranquillity was that of exhaustion, or of a despair, that felt itself powerless before the overwhelming material forces of Governments, who now showed little disposition to use with moderation the power which they had reconquered with so much difficulty. France, the first to fall into disorder, had been the first to set about the work of reorganisation. She had shown, by the election of Louis Napoleon as President, the determination to put an end to the social despotism of the men who had made her the sport of their insane theories. Twice had the revolutionary leaders in Paris,-on the 29th of January, and again on the 13th of June, 1849-endeavoured, by a rising of the mob, to recover the influence they had lost; but the firmness of the President, seconded by the prompt and de 1849 REACTION. 237 cided action of General Changarnier, had crushed their movements, and happily without bloodshed. An armed revolt of the Socialists in Lyons, on the 15th of June, had been no less effectually suppressed after hard fighting; and from this time, wherever anarchy attempted to rear its head, it was confronted and put down with an energy which satisfied the strong conservative instinct of the country. To this instinct the President continued to appeal, in his endeavours to give to France a Government which should restore confidence at home and respect abroad. So far he had succeeded; but the difficulties of the task on which he had entered were only begun. Who might tell whether he would be strong enough to carry France with him in the view. which he announced in his address to the Assembly, at the end of October, of the necessity of a single and firm direction,' or be driven from power by the democratic party, who were fully alive to the significance of this language, and resolved to dispute to the uttermost the principle which it involved? In Italy, again, the prospects of constitutional freedom were dark indeed. Her struggles had only resulted in placing her more than ever at the mercy of the absolute Governments which had so long stifled her energies and afflicted her people with a moral atrophy. The Two Sicilies were prostrate at the feet of a king from whom they were irrevocably alienated. Austria had not only reasserted her hold upon the Northern provinces; she had also advanced her troops into Tuscany to restore the sovereignty of the Grand Duke, and had reinstated under their bayonets the dethroned Princes of Parma and Modena. Rome was occupied by the French, ostensibly with the object of restoring the temporal supremacy of the Pope, but not without great suspicions of ulterior designs as to the disposal to their own advantage of the central provinces of the Italian peninsula. 238 AUSTRIA. 1849 Hungary was for the time disabled, and compelled to renounce the claim to independence, which her people were yet determined never to forego. The severity with which the Austrian Government had visited their revolted subjects, both in Italy and Hungary, had embittered the rancour of defeat, and had drawn upon them the obloquy of Europe. Their triumph through Russian aid had been dearly purchased; and it was foreseen, that at no distant period they would discover how fatally they had erred in joining with the other absolutist Powers in a policy of reaction, instead of striving by generous conciliation to make their dissatisfied subjects forget the bitter past.1 Set free from present anxiety within her own frontiers, Austria soon showed her determination to maintain at all hazards the hold upon Germany, to throw off which the national party there were now assured was the first step towards the accomplishment of their aims. It was no less the policy of Russia than of Austria to prevent the consolidation of Germany into a great European Power; and in this policy, France, jealous of the counterpoise of such a Power in European counsels, and ever hankering after the Rhine as a frontier, was ready to combine. But the impulse towards unity had been given; and although the King of Prussia was neither strong enough nor firm enough to pursue the bold The rulers of Austria,' Lord Palmerston wrote (9th September, 1849) to Lord Ponsonby, our ambassador at Vienna, 'have now brought their country to this remarkable condition, that the Emperor holds his various territories at the good will and pleasure of three external Powers. He holds Italy just as long as and no longer than France chooses to let him have it. The first quarrel between Austria and France will drive Austria out of Lombardy and Venice. He holds Hungary and Galicia just as long as and no longer than Russia chooses to let him have them. The first quarrel with Russia will detach those countries from the Austrian crown. He holds his German provinces by a tenure dependent in a great degree upon feelings and opinions which it will be very difficult for him and his Ministers either to combine with or stand out against.'-Life of Lord Palmerston, by the Hon. Evelyn Ashley, 1876, vol. i. p. 141. |