Social Transformations of the Victorian Age Part 8

The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals, appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves competed in attractiveness with the national a.s.semblies at Westminster. In proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have subst.i.tuted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the gallery is even to-day connived at rather than const.i.tutionally sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since, reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day.

Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical, they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions delivered. The reciprocity of the arrangement is, between him and his contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, a.s.suming the senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his views are placed before the public for the first time with all the advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic franchise, it has become an a.s.sembly primarily of business gentlemen, the chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent all but the most self a.s.sured and impa.s.sive from making the effort. It prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takes a pleasure in, its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an apt.i.tude for clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates for oratorical honours at St Stephen's tend steadily to diminish.

There is another kind of rivalry to which of late years the House of Commons has been exposed, which may excite a smile, but which is in its way a reality to be reckoned with. This is not that of the provincial platform, of the public meeting room, or of the debating society in its older development. These latter have always, among the lower middle cla.s.ses, fulfilled a function like that of the University Unions among the cla.s.ses somewhat better to do. Coger's Hall was the school of discussion in which the late Charles Bradlaugh acquired great power of direct and incisive utterance as well as a perfect control over his temper. London and all the great provincial towns have as many of these places as ancient Rome possessed of gladiatorial schools. A really new growth of the last quarter of the nineteenth century is the local Houses of Commons. These sprung up in and for every quarter or suburb of London, and in many provincial districts as well. They are still known, and sometimes much in vogue. They are not of course recognized by the legislature. Nor, as in the case of the munic.i.p.al bodies which we have already seen at work, is their machinery controlled by the Local Government Board. A seat in them has been known to be as much an object of rivalry among an increasing cla.s.s, as a place on the green leather benches of Westminster. The member for Kennington or Lavender Hill in the south of London, for Westbourne Grove or Shepherd's Bush in the west, for Haverstock Hill in the north, may even be as considerable a personage with his immediate friends in the district as the member for Westminster in the Imperial Parliament. The leader in the Hampstead House of Commons, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer in that which meets on Richmond Hill is not certain that he would change his place with his t.i.tular equivalents at St Stephen's. These are considerations that may explain why the House of Commons, whose supremacy was unchallenged under a Peel, a Stanley, a Palmerston, a Disraeli, a Gladstone, is regarded no longer with awe, sometimes with the familiarity that breeds contempt.

As yet this diminution of parliamentary prestige, if such there really be, is indicated only by a floating sentiment. It finds expression chiefly in social chatter or in newspaper flippancies. Nor in the present decade of the Victorian epoch are there many positive signs of our representative system being superseded by the controlling will of an individual autocrat for whom the late Mr Froude thought the time was steadily approaching. The same remark might with equal truth probably be made of every part in our national polity. It is certainly true of the House of Lords not less than of the monarchy. The position practically occupied by the Crown to-day, is that which the Prince Consort many years ago marked out for it. Some of these functions he was himself able to a.s.sist the Queen in discharging. To him there seemed to devolve upon the monarchy duties a.n.a.logous to those discharged by the permanent officials in the great departments of State.

Amid the vicissitudes of party, the rise and fall of Ministers, the changes of popular opinion, the Crown was in his judgment the one guarantee for continuity in policy, domestic not less than foreign. The occupant of the Throne took, as Ministers of State, those whom parliamentary majorities and public opinion indicated. The Sovereign however had other functions than merely to register and sanction the wish of subjects and the decisions of Commons. Chief among these, as every other page of Sir Theodore Martin's book during the Peelite and Palmerstonian periods clearly shows, was to judge of the quarters whence a stable Administration could be formed; whether, in fact, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, or Lord Derby, in a balanced state of parliamentary feeling, had the best chance of carrying on the Queen's government to the welfare of the realm and the confidence of its representatives. The most familiar aspects of the political and parliamentary situation have ceased to be now what in the Prince Consort's day they habitually were. The doctrine that Ministers are the free choice of the Sovereign was never propounded absolutely by the husband of the Queen. The doctrine was rather a.s.sumed by him in the interests of the national convenience than expressed in any terms defining the Royal prerogative. The slow process of absorption of the Peelites into the Liberal ranks; the lifelong rivalry of Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston produced, during much of the Prince Consort's time, a condition of unstable equilibrium in party organization, which in these later days of popular mandates, general elections which are plebiscites and of overwhelming majorities which amount to commissions of the democracy, it is not easy to realize.

Some there were who thought that the Liberal disruption of 1886 might reproduce in English politics the precarious and fluctuating relations of parties and statesmen that seemed between 1852 and 1865 to have become permanent. Had that forecast been fulfilled, the Sovereign to-day might be confronted with personal responsibilities of Ministerial selection which would have recalled the duty devolved upon her during earlier portions of her reign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The event of ten years ago has resulted not in party instability, but in fresh fixity of tenure to the political conglomerate that the const.i.tuencies have as yet shown no wish to dismiss. Of course in time the same conditions as of old must recur. The national organization of which Liberals as well as Conservatives are const.i.tuent parts, will at some day or other upon issues perhaps now unsuspected resolve themselves into their elements.

Ancient lines of demarcation will again declare themselves. A cycle of government by groups may yet be opened.[58] People and Parliament may still wait for the Royal choice to close an interval of confusion and of doubt. In whatever form this reversion to an older order may present itself, whatever the exact contingencies in store, the occupant of the Throne as has been shown above cannot divest himself of the right, therefore of the duty, of giving a casting vote when his officers of State hesitate, as Mr Disraeli did in 1868, as to the exact moment when the appeal to the const.i.tuences most advantageously can be made.

CHAPTER XX

ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE

The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened, and not weakened, by the const.i.tutional transfer of political power to Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince Consort's views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate field of the Crown's activities. His influence still a living force.

Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of Wales exactly follows his father's example.

Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her own s.e.x upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion Memorial,[59] probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture to say that a repet.i.tion of such an experience, however unlikely, is more impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs, though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign, however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects, bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more congenial to the graciousness of her s.e.x. An Elizabeth never willingly allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained its present completeness, must now be examined. From her s.e.x, and the circ.u.mstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or Royal Duke makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy actually operative among us to-day whether in its const.i.tutional, ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress of one systematizing and controlling mind.

That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, a.s.sistance in the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more conspicuously a.s.sociated with the representatives of the kingly principle in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms.

Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert: 'The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin' (the Princess Victoria).[60] Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte naturally supplied the first link of cousinly a.s.sociation between his nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and inst.i.tutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne's over sanguine antic.i.p.ations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that the proposed allowance of 50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp suggested, reduced to 21,000, was to be fixed at 30,000. All he regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.[61]

Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young Queen's governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys also contrived to pa.s.s in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was found, with no felonious intent, to have pa.s.sed the night under a sofa in a parlour next to the Queen's bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to lock up.[62] In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills in the bas.e.m.e.nt was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the const.i.tution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the economy and efficiency with which the Queen's Household was now conducted.

The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing rooms by fine and fas.h.i.+onable people for being ready to compromise the dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point of the Prince Consort's Court improvements was concentration of responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national apt.i.tude of the German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of palaces and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command, invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen's roof.

The composition of the Queen's immediate entourage is now practically the same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a d.u.c.h.ess.

She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids of Honour are also eight in number. These must be either the daughters or grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy t.i.tle of 'Honourable.'

Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons seem to fancy there exists a vital a.s.sociation between the gentleman who fills that position in the Queen's Household and the n.o.bleman who, as Lord Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to a.s.sist Her Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a seat in Lord Beaconsfield's last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not in virtue of his Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.

The Prince Consort's reforms in the economy and administration of the Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours, naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize his early idea of a.s.sociating for the first time since the days of the Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare's presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in painters and poets than in science.

Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the humanizing influences of foreign travel, must before long result in a marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds, of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for amus.e.m.e.nts and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to antic.i.p.ate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage.

The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least fortunate members;--these are the features of the time which in his survey of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.

So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been made in not, from the first, establis.h.i.+ng the Prince as the Queen's private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the whole Household. The Prince's remarkable apt.i.tudes had impressed the leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public.

Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840 Lady Lyttelton, then in attendance at Windsor, has recorded that 'there arose from the room below hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind of ba.s.s and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,' she adds, 'the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the organ.' April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day the revival of the public taste for cla.s.sical music in this country.

Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year, too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted for energies and knowledge to which under a Const.i.tutional monarchy political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of encouraging the legislature to complete the machinery for the removal of the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new 'apprentices.h.i.+p' which was to educate the emanc.i.p.ated negro for the blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances.

Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance inspiration of the moment.

This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been considered complete without the active partic.i.p.ation in it of the Crown, or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a s.p.a.ce in the second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince Consort's discriminating taste and patriotic industry would, if by nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen's husband, the Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these a.s.sociations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded.

Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.[63]

On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post, should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal Highness antic.i.p.ated his visitor by volunteering the remark that to him there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of considerable works. 'In all that related to practical dexterity (the department in which it was a.s.sumed that some instruction for fresco would be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.' Such were the Prince's words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism.

'Even to the varnish on coaches,' said the Prince, 'it is surprising how much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.' The talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The words of the Queen's husband are especially noticeable showing as they do his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England.

Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fas.h.i.+on was one, high example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake, in reference to the necessary limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty also, the Prince replied: 'You have expressed in a few words what I would have said in many.'[64]

This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically placed the Queen's husband in the van of the new movement for the encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince's opportunities of good were increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They ill.u.s.trate, as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day with the Sovereign or the Sovereign's social and ceremonial vicegerents.

Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman, for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the statesman's country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellors.h.i.+p of the University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen's eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force, which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.

The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest to Her Majesty's subjects.

CHAPTER XXI

CROWN AND SWORD

The Monro-Fawcett duel turned the Prince Consort's attention, as representing the Crown, to duelling, the abolition of which must begin with the army. Courts of Honour suggested as successful abroad. Why distrusted by English opinion. Views of the Duke and others. Hence the Court first occupied with army reforms to good results. Contrast between military resources 1837-97. Special attention of Court to military education. Old and new schools of officers compared. Duke of Wellington as Commander contrasted with his latest successors. Growth of rifle volunteers; special influences in military education, _e.g._ Edward Hamley. Military democracy. Why necessarily imperfect.

So plausible a case may theoretically be made out for the duel as a social inst.i.tution that it is not surprising the custom should have died hard in a combatant nation like the English. The ordeal by arms furnishes a simple if barbaric mode of settling personal differences without the scandal and the weariness of law; in an age whose boast is freedom of speech not less than of thought, whose bane is the degeneration of that chartered liberty into the unlicensed malignity and curiosity of small-talk, there always will be ill-conditioned persons whom only fear of the horsewhip, the rapier, or the pistol, can teach to discipline their tongue; all these things have been said in favour of the duel as a mode of social discipline. In practice, however, it was never found that the fear of a challenge ensured social discretion of tongue, or a higher standard of personal courtesy. When these combats were not farcical, as the duel has generally become in France, where it still survives, they proved the instruments of the professional homicide, who, trained to artistic murder, went about society, seeking a feud with those whom he or his patrons desired to be put out of the way. Stung to the quick by the brutalities of O'Connell, Sir Robert Peel, during the early forties demanded, as the story runs, the satisfaction which was not then an anachronism. The great Irishman replied that yielding to the expostulations of his wife, he must forego the pleasure of the encounter for which he was 'spoiling.' A second invitation was declined on the ground that the entreaties of his offspring had subdued the spirit of the warrior. Hence the point in Theodore Hook's epigram published in the _John Bull_ of the period:--

Some men in their horror of slaughter, Improve on the scriptural command; They honour their wife and their daughter, That their days may be long in the land.

The same statesman is known at a little later date to have been persuaded, not without difficulty, to abstain from sending a friend to his chief opponent[65] at the time of the latter's onslaughts on the Conservative concession of Free Trade. Since then, Wimbledon Common or Wormwood Scrubbs has probably never for a moment seriously suggested itself to any honourable gentleman as a possible place to which to adjourn a controversy with a parliamentary opponent.

A duel was the incident which caused the first intervention of the Prince Consort in the social arrangements of English life. On the 1st of July 1843, Colonel Fawcett had been shot by his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Monro. The latter had accepted the challenge most reluctantly; he had been the grossly aggrieved party.[66] Under the then existing code, the survivor's sole alternative to the certainty of being stigmatised as a coward had been to accept the risk of being hung for a felon. Eight years before the Queen's accession, in 1829, however, the great Duke of Wellington had faced Lord Winchilsea's pistol; the memories of the (1809) Canning-Castlereagh and other encounters did not then seem part of ancient history. The Prince Consort, with the military instincts of his race decided that the reform which he was bent on establis.h.i.+ng must begin with the army. The authority of the Duke of Wellington was at this moment paramount equally in social, political, and military life. The great general was known himself seriously to have considered the subject. With him therefore, the Prince arranged an interview. Courts of Honour were suggested by the Prince as rational subst.i.tutes for the appeal to the sword. The Tribunals des Marechaux were said to have done good work in France; Courts of Honour had been followed with the best results in the Bavarian army. The Duke's objection to the proposal was the English distrust of a secret tribunal; the authorities of the navy took the same view as the Commander-in-Chief. Sir George Murray, then Master of the Ordnance, a serious and accomplished man of the world, bluntly remarked that quarrels would not be made up, or differences composed by the arbitration of others; that the law as it already existed could do all which was practicable to repress the practice. The Prince persevered with his purpose. His suggestion was laid by the Secretary of State for War before his colleagues in the Cabinet. Though the scheme was not adopted in the form suggested by the Prince, his action in the matter led to an amendment in the Articles of War (April 1844). Henceforward it was declared to be suitable to the character of honourable men to apologize and offer redress for wrong or insult committed, and equally suitable for the aggrieved party frankly and cordially to accept the amende. Thus on the initiative of the Queen's husband, there began the organization of public opinion on the lines that have long since made the ordeal by arms as practically obsolete in England as the ordeal by touch.

The Queen's devotion to her army has always been that of a mother for her children; the Queen's grat.i.tude evinced upon all possible occasions to her soldiers for what they have done in the field has ever resembled that of a woman to the protector of the weak against the strong. It was natural therefore that, amid his civilian duties, the new representative of the Throne, himself nurtured in a land that from being the Mark of Brandenburg was growing into a great military monarchy, should actively show his interest in the whole field of military reform. Later, when the post became vacant, the Prince Consort, after consulting with the Ministers of the day, declined more than once the Commanders.h.i.+p-in-Chief. His suggestions for army reform, and for national defence during the period of the Crimean War, of the Indian Mutiny, and again during the Franco-Austrian wars were made with a sense of responsibility which the tenure of office could not have deepened as well as with a shrewd perception of the needs and possibilities of the time that no statesman of English birth could surpa.s.s. He had already been among the first to recognize the brilliant merits of the Duke of Wellington's plan for the defence of London, during the Chartist disturbances of 1848. To the Prince's discrimination it is largely due that this domestic exploit of the hero of Waterloo, not less memorable in its way than Waterloo itself,[67] came properly to be appreciated by the country. To this day the mighty fortresses which protect the sh.o.r.es of the Solent and Southampton Water, and which make that part of the previously too vulnerable South coast practically safe are to a great extent the memorials of the wisdom and exertion of the Prince Consort. He had already, while our soldiers were before Sebastopol, urged upon the Government of the day the establishment of militia depots in place of the regulars should they be withdrawn by an emergency, at Malta and elsewhere, along the line of our Mediterranean possessions. When therefore, the national alarm caused by the words and actions of our French ally found its expression in Lord Palmerston's scheme of coast defences, the memorandum on which these measures were based had been drawn up by the Prince Consort at the wish of the Cabinet, and practically formed the basis of the action of Ministers.

Nor of all the army reformers who have lived and worked since the Prince's day, is there one who has failed to testify his indebtedness to the suggestions of the husband of the Queen. In his many talks on this subject with the military advisers of the Government of the day, the Prince often antic.i.p.ated those improvements in the administration of the land forces of the Crown which since his time have been carried out. As the Prince Consort correctly inferred from the character of the English people as well as from the pace of official movements in England, must be the case, the progressive changes in the English army have been effected piecemeal by slow or minute instalments. The method pursued here has differed not less from that followed in the reorganization of Continental armies than the composition of the army of England differs from that of the great fighting machines of the rest of Europe. In Prussia, after the defeat of Jena (1806); in Austria after France had triumphed for Italy on the field of Solferino (1859) the organic reconstruction of armies was possible.

Nothing of the same sort has taken place in England. Nothing, as the Prince Consort perceived, of this kind could be effected here, unless under the conscription. That system the Queen's husband once observed was not likely to be established in England without a revolution.

The changes which the Prince suggested in able memoranda to successive Ministers, which indeed he partly foresaw as coming, may in their general results briefly be glanced at now. The mere enumeration of the military resources of the country on the Queen's accession and on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of that event needs few words to deepen the contrast.

In 1837 the total military strength (regular army) of the country was 101,000. Sixty years later these figures were 147,105.[68] In 1837 India was garrisoned by the Company's army of 26,500. In 1897 the Indian military strength was 74,299 British, 129,963 Native. The increase has been therefore, nearly threefold. In 1837 the Irish troops were 20,000. In 1897 these were between 26,000 and 27,000. As against the 26,000 troops in the Channel Islands and Great Britain in 1837, there were in 1897, 81,516.

The entire strength of the horsed-field artillery in the accession year was 72 guns--all at home. On New Year's Day 1897 the artillery total of all kinds at home and abroad was 219 batteries or companies. In 1837 the Horse Artillery batteries were armed with 12-pounder howitzers, and 6-pounder guns; the Field batteries had 9-pounder guns, 24-pounder howitzers. The infantry still used the old flint 'Brown Bess,' which in the cant phrase of the time was warranted at 200 yards to miss a haystack.

The Rifle regiments used the Brunswick rifle which at 400 yards, according to Lord Wolseley, could not implicitly be trusted. To-day, the equipping of our troops with the latest weapons of precision which contemporary science designs is of itself a great department of English artificers.h.i.+p.

Jealousy of the army is as much a bequest from Puritan times to the House of Commons, as jealousy of the Church. Under the two first Georges, bitter and tedious debates on the maintenance of the Hanoverian soldiers were of constant recurrence. As a consequence, the standing troops which in the Napoleonic wars had been 220,000 men were gradually reduced till in three years after the peace (1818), they were only 80,000 strong.

Not without much pressure had Parliament during the earliest infancy of the Colonies provided a handful of soldiers for the protection of settlers in the lands beyond the sea as well as for the maintenance of civil order at home. It was the paucity of the numbers available for his orders which rendered the Duke of Wellington's scheme of London defence against Chartist attack so memorable a piece of strategy. Even the influence and popularity of this great soldier only secured the existence of a small army at home on condition that it did not flaunt itself ostentatiously before the civilian population. To keep up any fighting strength at all the non-combatant portion of the army was reduced to an ineffective minimum. Without exception, regiments were weak in men and horses. The four chief company depots at home consisted of veterans waiting their discharge, of invalids, and of ineffective, or imperfectly effective, recruits.

Sometimes, as during the Canadian and Jamaica troubles in the earlier years of the reign, additional troops were required for the Colonies.

These were composed of volunteers from other regiments and of casual recruits. The _personnel_ of our army may be inferred from the Duke of Wellington's oft-quoted remark that the man who enlisted was the worst and most drunken inhabitant of the village. This was the sc.u.m of the earth which under officers trained on the playing fields of Eton, the Duke had led to victory in his Peninsular campaigns and in the Low Countries against the consummate veterans of the French army. To win the affection of his men; to make them feel that their commander was also their friend, and of the same flesh and blood as themselves never occurred to the great Duke. His latter-day successor, Lord Wolseley, on the Christmas day of 1896, visited the Wellington Barracks to taste the pudding and test the comforts of the men. That was not the great Duke's way.

The moral and social improvement in the private soldier since the era of humaner treatment began is shown by a progressive decrease in the number of Courts Martial. In 1876 they were 12,187, in 1895, 8,211, a reduction of about one-third. The treatment of soldiers by their superiors was admirably adapted to demoralize them as men without improving them as soldiers. When the recruit took the Queen's s.h.i.+lling, he ceased to be a free citizen. He had said farewell to the world outside the barrack yard.

He became a nameless piece of martial machinery; sometimes he was indulged; more often he was flogged. Nothing that could extinguish respect for himself or his officers, was left undone. It had been the Duke of Wellington's business to win victories not to conciliate men. The moral and personal influence of such men as Lord Roberts and others which since the Duke's day has been exercised for the moral and physical advantage of the soldier is not an instrument that the hero of Waterloo often employed; he did not believe in it. Nor was it a soldier, but a schoolmaster, Dr Arnold of Rugby, who formulated the truth, that the best way of improving character is to treat persons on the a.s.sumption of their becoming what you wish them to be.

To pa.s.s to other details in the military contrast between the sixtieth and the first years of the Queen's reign the short service system which has proved admittedly so effective had occurred as a possibility only to a few reformers of whom the Prince Consort was one, and Sir Charles Napier another. In 1837 enlistment was for life or twenty-one years; the seven years' term had been urged already by Napier. It was not however till 1847 that the reduction to ten years was sanctioned and then only by way of special inducement for recruits when they were exceptionally few. Those who can recall the scenes witnessed outside public houses in the country, in the purlieus of Westminster or Trafalgar Square in London will not consider the term 'crimping' too strong an expression to apply to the process of forcing the Queen's s.h.i.+lling into the hands of half tipsy yokels, and entirely intoxicated or desperate roughs. Nor is it surprising that the Sergeant Kites of the period found all their arts of inventive persuasion, all their largesses of drink necessary to induce the gallant fellows whom they addressed to serve the Queen. Without the stimulating allurement of drums and fifes playing, of banners flying, and unless the future had been seen through a haze of beery or spirituous splendour, the tale of recruits would have fallen lamentably short.

In the eyes of sober citizens of the industrial cla.s.s, the life of the soldier seemed only one degree less dismal and shameful than the career of the hulks. As a fact the soldier's lot was perhaps half a century ago not much more tolerable than that of the convict s.h.i.+pped for his offences beyond seas. A prison with a chance of being killed in it represented in the popular eye the existence of the private soldier. It involved transportation with hard labour as a matter of course. One battalion first raised in 1700 had been the whole of those 137 years abroad on active service. When his destiny was less severe than this, a life insufferably tedious was led by him in barracks pestilently unhealthy. To-day, upon a different plane of comfort, and on a reduced scale of luxury, the private soldiers may be said to enjoy the same recreations and opportunities of improvement as his officer. He is the master of his own time during several of the best hours in every day. He has no more difficulty in obtaining leave up to midnight for a theatre visit than a Woolwich cadet in getting a Sunday exeat from the Academy. Rooms for study and pastime are provided within his barracks.

Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in 1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever, with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their country's battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of regulars every other branch of the Service.