1850 QUEEN STRUCK BY LIEUTENANT PATE. 285

cowardly outrage upon the Queen, committed, not, as on former occasions, by a person of mean condition, but by a man of good family, called Robert Pate, who had held a commission in the army for five years. While Her Majesty was leaving Cambridge House, where she had called to make inquiries for the Duke of Cambridge who was seriously ill, this person started forward and struck a blow with a cane at Her Majesty's face. Its force was fortunately broken by the bonnet, but it inflicted a severe bruise on the forehead." It is to this attack that the Prince alludes in the following letter to Baron Stockmar the next day:

'Dear Stockmar,-I have only a minute to spare, and avail myself of it to tell you that Victoria, thank God, is well, although her forehead is much bruised, and her nerves are still somewhat shaken by the shameful occurrence of yesterday. The perpetrator is a dandy, whom you must often have seen in the Park, where he had made himself conspicuous. He maintains the closest silence as to his motives, but is manifestly deranged. All this does not help to make one cheerful.

In the House the debate on Greece has already lasted four nights. Palmerston spoke for five hours without a moment's pause. His speech is a masterpiece. The state of affairs, however, will not be improved by it; and we may have a resignation of the Ministry to-morrow. Peel, Graham, Gladstone, Disraeli, Molesworth, Cobden, all go against the Ministry, and speak in strong terms. The Ministry has identified itself entirely with Palmerston.

The Exhibition is now attacked furiously by The Times, and the House of Commons is going to drive us out of the

Pate was subsequently tried, on the 11th of July, and sentenced to seven years' transportation, the jury having declined to recognise the plea of insanity, which, as usual, was set up by Pate's counsel. No motive for the attack was ever assigned.

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RESULT OF GREEK DEBATE.

1850

Park. There is immense excitement on the subject. If we are driven out of the Park the work is done for!!

was anything so foolish.

'Buckingham Palace, 28th June, 1850.'

6

Never

From this letter it is apparent that down to the last the fate of the Ministry hung in the balance. The division of next morning, however, removed all uncertainty upon this subject. The House of Commons had, by its vote, accepted the defence, more able and admirable than convincing,' as it has been called by a not unfriendly critic, of the statesman whose political existence depended on the result. His position,' the same writer adds, was an appeal to parliamentary magnanimity, and he and his partisans made a triumph of the occasion. But opinions remained much what they were before.' This no doubt was so; but having perilled the existence of the Ministry upon the defence of his policy, Lord John Russell had now no alternative but to put aside the intention which he had for some time entertained, of arranging for the acceptance by Lord Palmerston of some other office, where his great energy and vigorous practical sense, undisturbed by the strong personal feelings which influenced his demeanour towards foreign States, might be used with unalloyed advantage.

Miss Harriet Martineau, in her sketch of Lord Palmerston, Biographical Sketches, London, 1869, p. 147.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Ir was well for the Prince that the recent Whitsuntide recess had enabled him to recruit his strength and spirits in the open-air life at Osborne, where he found ever welcome recreation in superintending the works in progress, in laying out the grounds, in planning farm cottages, and making experiments with his sewage apparatus. On the 23rd of May he writes from there to the Dowager Duchess of Coburg:-

'In our island home we are wholly given up to the enjoyment of the warm summer weather. The children catch butterflies, Victoria sits under the trees, and I drink the Kissingen water Ragotzky. To-day Mama-Aunt (the Duchess of Kent) and Charles (Prince Leiningen) are to come to stay a fortnight with us: then we go to town to compress the (so-called) pleasures of the season into four weeks. God be merciful to us miserable sinners!'

But the return to town brought, in addition to the usual fatigues of the London season, unusual anxiety in the critical condition of the Ministry; and this was now to be followed by other incidents, which imposed a strain of the severest kind upon the spirits and energy of the Prince.

To add to the manifold difficulties which already attended the preparations for the Great Exhibition, an opposition of the most determined character had grown up both in the press and in Parliament to its being placed in Hyde Park.

288

FRIENDLY RELATIONS BETWEEN

1850 For a time this opposition threatened to be triumphant, and the Commissioners saw no alternative, in that event, but to abandon the scheme altogether. While things were in this state, the assault upon the Queen came still further to increase the Prince's anxiety, and a few days afterwards the death of Sir Robert Peel, in which he had to mourn not merely a disaster to the nation, but a loss to himself of a most valued friend.

Enough has already been said in these volumes to show how deep and cordial was the mutual regard which subsisted between two men, who were naturally attracted to each other by a community of tastes and principles in art, in literature, in morals, and in politics. When Sir Robert Peel's Ministry came to an end, the Prince had asked that the cessation of the Minister's official relations with the Court might make no alteration in other respects in the intercourse between them. 'I shall be very happy,' was the reply from Drayton Manor, 'to avail myself of your Royal Highness's kind permission occasionally to write to your Royal Highness. However much I am enjoying the contrast between repose and official life, I may say, I hope without presumption,-I am sure with perfect sincerity,-that the total interruption of every sort of communication with your Royal Highness would be a very severe penalty. It was only yesterday that I was separating from the rest of my correspondence all the letters which I have received from the Queen and your Royal Highness during the long period of five years, in order that I might ensure their exemption from the fate to which in these days. all letters (however confidential) seem to be destined, and I could not review them without a mixed feeling of gratitude for the considerate indulgence and kindness of which they contained such decisive proofs, and of regret that such a source of constantly recurring interest and pleasure was dried up. I can act in conformity with your Royal Highness's

1850

THE PRINCE AND SIR R. PEEL.

289

gracious wishes, and occasionally write to you without saying a word of which the most jealous or sensitive successor in the confidence of the Queen could complain.'1

Subsequent intercourse had drawn closer and closer the bond of friendship, which had been established almost from the beginning of their correspondence. In Sir Robert Peel the Prince found an adviser to whom he could always turn in perfect reliance on a loyal sincerity, which delighted to place at his command all the resources of his wide experience and his matured thought. Having since 1846 renounced his place as a leader in the war of party, Sir Robert Peel was in a position more fully to appreciate the dispassionate yet earnest vigilance with which the Prince, as he knew from his official experience, regarded on principle all political and social questions; while on the other hand the Prince had constant reason to admire the single-minded patriotism of the statesman, whose services to the country were never more conspicuous than since his retirement from office, in giving dignity and breadth of view to the deliberations of Parliament. His support to the Prince upon the Commission for the Great Exhibition had been unflagging; and in the approaching discussion in Parliament as to its site would have been invaluable. To lose such a friend at such a time was, therefore, no ordinary calamity. How the Prince felt it, his letters show. Thus, on the day after Sir Robert Peel's death, he writes to Baron Stockmar:

'Dear Stockmar,-You will mourn with us deeply, for you know the extent of our loss, and valued our friend as we did.

1 In the same letter, this passage occurs: The best speculation which this country could engage in would be a Royal Gallery worthy of a national collection of pictures. If there were some vacant apartments, they would be filled by presents and bequests of pictures worth ten times the cost of erecting them.' Twenty-six years have elapsed since, and we are no nearer the fulfilment of this suggestion; for the increased space of our National Gallery is already more than forestalled.