1848

BELGIUM REMAINS UNSHAKEN.

23

descended upon the Belgian frontier, in place of meeting with the sympathy on which it had counted, it found itself unexpectedly surrounded at Quiévrain by a united force of military and peasants, who quietly marched off some of the invaders to prison, whilst others were conducted back to the French frontier.

'Belgium,' the Queen wrote to King Leopold, a few days afterwards, is a bright star in the midst of dark clouds. It makes us all very happy.' It is easy to conceive how welcome to the Queen and Prince was the assurance that one kingdom had remained unshaken amid the general upheaval, and that the kingdom of one who was endeared to them by so many ties. What they had endured since the outburst of the revolutionary tempest in Paris will be best shown by a few words from a letter of Her Majesty on the 6th of March to Baron Stockmar: 'I am quite well-indeed particularly so, though God knows we have had since the 25th enough for a whole life,--anxiety, sorrow, excitement, in short, I feel as if we had jumped over thirty years' experience at once. The whole face of Europe is changed, and I feel as if I lived in a dream.'

Besides the anxieties, specially due to their position, which were occasioned to the Queen and Prince by the course of public events abroad, they had to suffer much from natural sympathy with their relatives, to whom these events had brought misery and disaster. As one by one the members of the French Royal Family arrived to claim their sheltering kindness, the terrible contrast to the circumstances under which an affectionate intimacy with them had grown up could not fail to excite deep emotion. You know,' writes the Queen, in the letter to Baron Stockmar just cited, my love for the family; you know how I longed to get on better terms with them again. . . . and you said, “Time will alone, but will certainly bring it about." Little

24

STATE OF GERMANY.

1848

did I dream that this would be the way we should meet again, and see each other all in the most friendly way. That the Duchess de Montpensier, about whom we have been quarrelling for the last year and a half, should be here as a fugitive, and dressed in the clothes I sent her, and should come to thank me for my kindness, is a reverse of fortune which no novelist would devise, and upon which one could moralise for ever.'1

The convulsion in Germany had brought ruin upon the estates of Prince Hohenlohe, the husband of the Queen's halfsister, and of her half-brother, Prince Leiningen. Writing on the 27th of March to the Queen, the Princess Hohenlohe says, after mentioning that her husband Prince Ernest will go to attend the Diet at Frankfort in compliance with the King of Würtemberg's wish: What this meeting will bring, God knows! I mean for Germany. For us, personally, there is nothing more to be done at present. undone and must begin a new existence of privations, which I don't care for, but for poor Ernest I feel it more than I can say.'

6

We are

Each successive letter from the Princess brought more vividly home the state of utter confusion which reigned around her. All minds,' she writes from Stuttgart (3rd April), are on the stretch, as well they may be, while so much, everything is at stake. Never was such a state of lawless "vagabondage" as there is now all over Germany, more or less. At all hours of the day young men are walking about the streets doing nothing. The work-people have nothing to do, the merchants can sell nothing, the manufacturers

To-day is historical,' says Lady Lyttelton, writing from Windsor on the 6th March, Louis Philippe having come from Claremont to pay a private (very private) visit to the Queen. She is really enviable now, to have in her power and in her path of duty such a boundless piece of charity and beneficent hospitality. The reception by the people of England of all the fugitives has been beautifully kind.'

1848

STATE OF GERMANY.

25

have nothing to occupy their work-people, and are obliged to dismiss them.' Again, writing four days later, the Princess says: "I think you can hardly have an idea of the state Germany is in now. The want of respect for all that is called law is dreadful. I don't speak of ourselves, or out of fear; there is no danger at this moment for us more than any other "Bürger," but the spirit of utter demoralisation in the lower classes is something beyond belief. . . . In Baden it is worse, and more or less this spirit is the same all over Germany, and unfortunately those that are in the good and right principles are afraid to act and speak. . . . You have no idea how low Ernest sometimes is; it quite distresses me to see it. I think women can bear up better against the blows of misfortune than men, particularly when they cannot be active in the strife round about them, but see things go down more and more every day, and are yet not able to move a hand to steady the wheel.'

From Coburg and Gotha, too, came from time to time. accounts of violence and revolutionary excitement of a most disquieting kind. You know,' the Queen writes to Baron Stockmar (22nd April), 'how attached I am to that country, how I longed to see our little Coburg again. You will therefore imagine easily how deeply grieved I am to see the present state of things; for in their present wild madness they tear down all that was good and useful, as well as what ought to be destroyed. . . . It is wonderful to see how my dear Prince bears up under so much anxiety and distress: for these one must feel, if one loves one's country and sees the awful state things have got into. But he is full of courage, and takes such a large and noble view of everything that he overlooks trifles, and looks solely to the general good. . . . How can one be happy, when one sees and hears of such misery all around? The poor Hohenlohes and Charles Leiningen have suffered much. And then these poor exiles

26

RECEPTION OF ORLEANS FAMILY.

1848

at Claremont! Their life, their future breaks one's heart to think of. How one must pity them all!'

There were some who were disposed to infer from the personal kindness shown by the Queen and Prince to the Orleans family, that the establishment of a Republic in France was regarded at our Court with active hostility. Speaking on the 28th of February, Lord John Russell had anticipated such mistaken surmises by stating, that while it was not the intention of the Government to interfere in any way whatever with any settlement France might think proper to make with respect to her own government, he did not believe England would refuse to perform any of those sacred duties of hospitality which she has performed at all times to the vanquished whoever they were, whether of extreme royalist opinions, of moderate opinions, or of extreme liberal opinions. Those duties of hospitality,' he added, amid the cheers of the House, have made this country the asylum for the unfortunate, and I for one will never consent that we should neglect them.' But even the jealous suspicions of the French Provisional Government, which took the shape, a few days afterwards, of an official complaint on account of the kindness shown in England to the ex-Royal Family, might have been quieted, could they have known in what terms the Queen had written to King Leopold on the 1st of March, three days before Louis Philippe reached the English coast.

About the King and Queen we still know nothing. We do everything we can for the poor family, who are indeed sorely to be pitied. But you will naturally understand that we cannot make cause commune with them, and cannot take a hostile position to the new state of things in France. We leave them alone; but if a Government which has the approbation of the country be formed, we shall feel it necessary to recognise it in order to pin them down to

1848 CHARTIST DISTURBANCES IN LONDON.

27

maintain peace and the existing treaties, which is of the greatest importance. It will not be pleasant to do this, but the public good and the peace of Europe go before one's personal feelings.'

It was to be expected that the success of the revolution in Paris should set in motion among ourselves some of those elements of disturbance which are to be found in large cities, where there will always be numbers of hungry and unscrupulous men to listen to the assurances of hot-headed or ambitious enthusiasts, that the panacea for all their grievances is to be found in revolution. London was for some time kept in a ferment by the noisy mobs who were drawn together by agitators of this description. On the 6th of March they assembled in Trafalgar Square in very considerable numbers, on the occasion of a meeting against the Income Tax, convened by Mr. Cochrane, an unsuccessful candidate for Westminster at the last election, and gave the police some trouble to disperse. For some days turbulent crowds made themselves so obnoxious by obstructing the thoroughfares, breaking windows, and putting shopkeepers in alarm for their property, that a feeling of indignation at the exploits of a contemptible rabble became general. The arrest of a few of the ringleaders was sufficient to restore peace. The movement, however, probably received its most deadly blow from the torrent of ridicule which it provoked on all hands. But when some weeks afterwards the agitation by the Chartists took a more serious shape, the public

2

2 A portion of the mob had rushed to Buckingham Palace, on the evening of the 6th of March, shouting Vive la République,' breaking the lamps as they went, and headed by a youth wearing epaulettes. The sight of the Guard, who turned out at their approach, was enough to quell their ardour. Soon afterwards the hero of the epaulettes was seized by the police, and began to cry! Such an incident was not likely to escape the notice of the great caricaturist of the day, Mr. John Leech, and it was turned by him to most admirable account in the next number of that 'abstract and brief chronicle of the time'-Punch. (See Punch, vol. xiv. p. 112).