IMPERIAL GROWTH

“Dere’s grandma dinks she’s nicht small beer, Mit Boers und such she interfere; She’ll learn none owns dis hemisphere, But Me--und Gott.

She dinks, good frau, some ships she’s got, Und soldiers mit der scarlet goat. Ach! We could knock dem! Poof! Like dot, Myself--mit Gott.” _A. McGregor Rose._ 1897.

As some one has put it, under Lord Salisbury’s political guardianship the Queen could sleep in peace; upon him had fallen the mantle of Beaconsfield so far as Victoria’s favour went, though, honestly, Salisbury showed little veneration for his predecessor, whom he regarded as divided from himself by class and race. Salisbury had won his election on a “No Coercion” cry, thereby securing the adhesion of the Irish members. But he was an advocate of tradition, a champion of conservatism and aristocracy. He had fought each one of Gladstone’s reforms with all his strength, whether in the suffrage, the Church or the Army. When Disraeli “dished the Whigs” by bringing in his Reform Bill of 1867, Salisbury resigned rather than be associated with it. He had none of Disraeli’s plasticity, none of his sympathy for the workers which made him once say, when talking of the narrow, selfish ways of many Whig and Tory landed proprietors who made their class hated by excluding the people from their parks and demesnes, “I for one cannot and will not do anything so absurd.” But even one so steeped in the past as the new Prime Minister had to bend to the living forces of the time and accept Joseph Chamberlain as a colleague. This one-time ultra-Radical had rapidly assimilated the new Imperialism; he was a fighter, and power pleased his senses, and it was his imperialism which made him refuse to Ireland what he had been so anxious to give his own countrymen, a measure of justice and self-rule.

The Queen and her advisers, then, were in accord, and Disraeli’s cry of a world-power seemed to be taking shape in fact. Indeed, after her Jubilee Victoria found herself much nearer that ideal than she had hoped ever to be when Beaconsfield died. Princes had come from all quarters of the globe to do her homage; her name was the link which bound the far ends of the earth together.

Yet there was one little country the people of which had refused to bow the knee to her greatness, and that was Ireland. Starved in every way, its manufactures destroyed, railways refused to it, its people left to the bitterest oppression of the exploiter, Ireland stood, sullen and defiant, while all the world knelt on that fine June day in 1887; for Ireland regarded its queen as its enemy.

Those who lived in comfort in England, who had no knowledge of all the conditions in Ireland--conditions very different from those of Ulster--were aghast, and had no pity when the Government changed its tactics and declared for coercion of the most stringent type. Nearly three thousand families were cast roofless upon the roadside; and the terrible injustice of Mitchelstown, which occurred in September 1887, leaves a permanent blot upon the record of the then Irish Secretary. In this tragedy the slaughter of three Irishmen was finally left as though it had been the slaughter of three dogs, and it, with the evictions, gave birth to the second popular English movement in favour of Ireland which has, at long last, culminated in the present Home Rule Act. For the people know, what biassed rulers will not recognize, that unreproved violence by servants of the State means injustice; they themselves have suffered from it. Yet in England Chamberlain was allowed to gain for his countrymen the County Councils and the possession of allotments, while other isolated reforms took place which showed that the Conservatives were beginning to know the value of popular support.

The writer of the article in _The Quarterly Review_ asserts that her Majesty “desired almost passionately to be loved by the Irish”; a statement which makes one dumb with surprise, for during a reign of sixty-four years she made no effort to understand the people or their conditions; for forty years--from 1859 to 1899--she refused to go near their shores; she was always ready to apply the rod and unwilling to give any kiss of peace.

If in the end she did desire the affection of those people, it is one of the tragedies of her life that she did not earlier wake up to the possibilities of the sister isle, that the mellowing of her heart came too late. It is also a proof that the Queen Victoria of 1899 was a totally different person from the Queen of 1861. She had learned at last to trust and love her English subjects, and perhaps, had it only happened earlier, she would have found means to know and then to love her Irish subjects also. As it is, it cannot be a matter for surprise that Queen Victoria never gained the love of the Irish.

For the fourteen years that remained to her from the Jubilee the Queen set herself to secure the English. She did not change her long-cherished plans, but still paid three visits a year to Osborne, two to Balmoral, and a month abroad, which left her little time for Windsor and practically none for London. But London had grown used to this, and relied upon the Princess of Wales to organize “the season” and so keep society going.

On her journeys Victoria would go hither and thither, laying foundation-stones, reviewing troops, opening hospitals and town halls, christening or launching battleships, such as the _Royal Sovereign_ and the _Royal Arthur_, visiting large towns in England and Scotland, such as Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, Paisley, Glasgow, etc. Bristol also she went to, when the spirit of love and forgiveness had become a habit with her, in 1899; for Bristol had been shunned by her since the early years of her reign, as it had refused to welcome a German prince as her husband. In 1899 she visited the principality of Wales, Sir Henry Robertson lending her Palé Hall, near Lake Bala, whence she went to see the Theodore Martins, who lived in the neighbourhood.

Sir Theodore Martin, like many of those who had had much personal intercourse with their Queen, has told much about her that it is pleasant to know; in his case it is enshrined in a little volume, _Queen Victoria as I Knew Her_. Once, when at Osborne on a wintry January day he had hurt his leg on the skating-pond, and had to keep his room for a considerable time. As soon as the Queen knew of the accident she telegraphed for Martin’s wife (the one-time famous Shakespearean actress, Helena Faucit), and sent the royal yacht to fetch her. The next morning her Majesty went to see the injured man, and after leaving him it occurred to her that he did not look comfortable, so she sent a servant with two large pillows for his use. It was Theodore Martin who, on March 7, 1875, found the Queen in tears “and moved to a degree that was distressing to witness,” for Sir Arthur Helps had died from a chill caught at the Prince of Wales’s levee. Her first thought was for his family, and how the embarrassments from which they might suffer could be lightened.

While in Wales those few days she did her best to charm the people who saw her, even to the extent of learning sufficient Welsh to thank in their own language a party of men who presented her with a walking-stick of native wood.

Wherever she went she pursued an active policy of giving as well as receiving pleasure, for, like little Kay in the _Snow Queen_, the piece of glass in her heart had at last melted and she was again human, and more like the girl-queen of 1837 than she had been since her marriage.

If only it had happened before those lost years were spent there would be no two opinions about Queen Victoria. As it was she had not time enough left her to catch up with neglected opportunities. English jealousy of her love for Scotland and Germany had been allowed too long a life to be permanently overcome by her old-age repentance or growth of kindliness. Those who knew her and whom she liked, ladies who received her charmingly sympathetic letters of condolence, still adore her memory; a great proportion of the nation see her faults rather than her virtues, a large proportion have no interest in her at all, and a few repeat the old cry of her great goodness and wisdom. On the whole, judgment about the Queen must be regarded as suspended.

There was one more disagreeable matter up to which she felt that she had to screw her courage, and that was an endeavour to persuade the nation to allot maintenance to the third generation of her family. These incidents become wearisome by repetition, and I should like to pass this by, but it has to be related that this part of her life may be rounded off. Albert Victor was twenty-five that year, and Princess Louise of Wales was about to marry the Duke of Fife, who had for a couple of years been _persona grata_ at Court. The dear lady had in England twenty-two grandchildren beside, most of them threatened with loss of income on the death of their parents.

So once more the Queen girded on her armour, determined to get the whole matter settled at one stroke, and asked Salisbury to make an arrangement which should automatically pension each grandchild as occasion needed, and hinted that the same sum should be given to the second generation as to the first; that is, £15,000 each a year to the boys, and £6000, with a marriage portion of £30,000, to the girls.

Salisbury could not--indeed, dared not--suggest such a course, and the discussion was started in Parliament by the reading of the two messages from the Queen concerning Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, and the Princess Louise.

At once all the old arguments arose, less noisy, but stronger and deeper, than before; for Bradlaugh was at hand, with his long-advocated republicanism, his denunciation of the extravagance and wastefulness of keeping a Court. Labouchere, too, had weight, and John Morley lent dignity to the expostulations. Bradlaugh wanted to refer the whole question of royal revenues to a committee for reconsideration, arguing that the royal savings on the Civil List would amply provide for all the grandchildren. This amendment was lost, but 125 members voted for it. Gradually the demand was lessened, the Queen withdrawing those for her daughters’ children, and then those for the children of her younger sons; but at last it was only through the mediation of Gladstone, who was anxious to save the Monarchy from any further criticism and dispute, that the ministers modified the proposal to granting a sum of £36,000 annually to the Prince of Wales for the support of his children. Even this met with opposition from the Radicals, Labouchere demanding a peremptory refusal to the making of any grant to the grandchildren at all, and his amendment to this effect gained 116 supporters. A further amendment by John Morley ensuring finality by declaring that no further demands could be made was lost by 355 to 134. Lord Selborne saw in all this ominous signs of a recrudescence of republicanism. It would have been more correct to have judged that republicanism had quietly grown stronger through the years owing to the constant demands made by the sovereign, accompanied by her neglect of her people.

Now that the order of things has changed, and there is less royal interference with the Government, few people trouble about republicanism, though its theoretical supporters may have greatly increased; but the popular sentiment of independence is stronger than ever, and if any ruler of Britain suddenly assumed arbitrary power the Conservatives themselves would be among those resenting it; they, too, would show themselves republican.

The grants made in 1889 were subject to this restriction, that they should continue only until six months after her Majesty’s death, for naturally then different arrangements would have to be made. With this conclusion the Queen, though only half pleased, declared herself satisfied, and it is amusing to note that while the negotiations were pending, and Gladstone, as usual, was doing his best for his sovereign, she sent friendly congratulations to him on his golden wedding day; the Prince and Princess of Wales did the same, accompanying them with a present.

As a last word on money matters and the Queen’s ability to see after her grandchildren it may be as well to state what her income was at the time.

The Duchy of Lancaster, which had been a negligible factor when her first Civil List was arranged, producing only £5000 a year, now brought in £60,000, a small part of which went in administration of the estates. There was also £60,000 from the Civil List, and all the income from investments and shares, house and landed property which she had secured through savings on the Civil List. During these last debates it was officially stated that the total savings on the Civil List only amounted to £824,025, and that out of this much had been spent on entertaining foreign visitors; in fact, the actual amount which had been put to the Queen’s credit was £653,000, a sum which, laid out at interest, could scarcely be regarded as despicable. In addition to this there were the legacy of a quarter of a million left her by John Camden Neild, other smaller legacies from subjects, and the sum the Queen inherited under the will of the Prince Consort, which popular report said was nearly a million pounds, though this must have been a great exaggeration. Truly Labouchere had some justification for inviting the special committee to record its opinion that it was undesirable to prejudice any final decisions by granting allowances or annuities to any of the grandchildren of the sovereign.

Sir H. W. Lucy, in _Later Peeps at Parliament_, states that he was told by one in authority that the Queen’s personality did not exceed at her death the sum of 800,000; and this might well be if she had already made the promised provision for her descendants, and she had certainly done much for her children.

During the last years of her Court, when comparative social gaiety was observed, the royal household expenses were increased; and it is said that she had become so mellowed that she made up deficiencies in some departments from her privy purse. It was a pity that occasional evidences of generosity were not given to the public by Victoria, for there was a strong popular belief that she had become miserly, which was strengthened by the fact that neither during the Jubilee of 1887 nor that of 1897 did she show any gratitude for a long life of unbounded opportunity by dispensing money of her own in any good cause. Her small habits of strict economy lasted to the end of her life, and little payments for work done which had been considered adequate in 1861 were so considered in 1901.

As an instance of this, a covering cloth was used for the donkey which drew the Queen’s chair, to be thrown over him when standing still, which cloth was bound all round with black braid. When the braid was worn a poor woman of Windsor was employed to renew it and to re-work the royal monogram in the corner, for which she never received more than one and sixpence. Of course, a thing like this might never come to the personal knowledge of the Queen, yet she was so precise about details, so observant of everything around her, that those about Windsor who knew of royal habits would not believe but that such things were governed by her Majesty’s wishes.

During the parliamentary debate the tremendous expenditure incurred by the royal yachts was again urged, and H. W. Lucy gives in his book interesting information concerning three of them. The little _Elfin_, built at a charge of only £6000 early in the reign, cost yearly such a sum that in 1900 it was estimated that £500 a ton had been spent over it; a man-of-war would in the same period have cost £80 a ton. The _Victoria and Albert_, built in 1855, cost originally £176,820, but, apart from wages of the crew and supply of stores, the nation had subsequently paid £12,000 a year for it, which brought the total expense to nearly three-quarters of a million. The _Alberta_ was built in 1863, being quickly followed by the _Osborne_, the initial charge for the latter being £134,000, and the annual expenditure for her being £8000. In addition to this there was the _Fairy_. Yet, possessing all these, it was announced in the papers late in 1895 that a new yacht was to be built for the Queen’s use, assurance being given that no attempt would be made to rival the floating palace of the Kaiser. As Victoria had by that time lost her nerve on the water, this may not have been true, though, on the other hand, it may have shown a desire for something especially steady and safe.

The troublesome matter of the royal incomes being at last swept from her life, the Queen turned to more stately things. In August 1889 she received for the second time as a guest the Shah of Persia, and later came her nephew, William II of Prussia, on a visit.

There were wheels within wheels to bring about the imperial meeting. Before he had been Kaiser a month William had rushed off--without invitation--to Russia, desiring to prove not only his severance from England, but that _he_ could bring about the longed-for Russian entente. He was not received too warmly, and afterwards he waited in vain for a return visit from the Tsar. Meanwhile, during the next twelve months, he was trying to prove, first to himself and then to the world, who was really master of Prussia--he or Bismarck. Knowing the jealousy between Russia and England and the hatred of Bismarck for all that was British, he then determined to flout both the Tsar and his Chancellor by discovering an elaborate warmth of friendship for his grandmother and her country. So he steamed away from Germany, much to Bismarck’s anger, in his beautiful yacht, the _Hohenzollern_, at the head of a dozen new warships, to Portsmouth Harbour.

He was received with open arms, and promptly created an admiral of the English Fleet, whereupon he solemnly made his grandmother a colonel of dragoons, re-naming the regiment “The Queen of England’s Own.” He also held out the olive branch to his uncle the Prince of Wales by gazetting him a colonel in the Prussian Army. It was a merry farce of compliments on the one side, for the Queen never rode at the head of her dragoons, nor did the Prince of Wales ever lead his Prussian regiment. The Emperor regarded his new honour somewhat differently, for when he went to Athens in the following October to be present at the marriage of his sister with Prince Constantine of Greece he steamed into the Ægean Sea with the British admiral’s flag flying at his yacht’s masthead, and prosecuted what he fancied to be the duties of a British admiral with greater zeal than discretion. For a British squadron was in the bay, and he would descend upon it at all unearthly hours, order the men up for parade, inspect uniforms, stores and the condition of the ships in a way which raised the anger of the officers and men alike, so that at last a complaint was sent to the Admiralty by the former. As some one said, “If he would just wear the uniform and let it end there we should not mind; but we did not make him an admiral that our lives might be worried out of us in this fashion.”

William was by this and subsequent visits fired with fresh enthusiasm for his own fleet, and cogitated methods of securing advantage for it. Thus when Anglo-French-German disputes arose over territory in Africa, he was ready in 1890 to forgo his purely nominal authority in Zanzibar for definite possession of Heligoland. His grandmother could deny him nothing, and though Lord Salisbury has generally been blamed for losing this rocky yet valuable little island, the act was the Queen’s, who did not suspect the astuteness of the policy which not only gained for Germany a much stronger naval base, but ousted the British from a spot too near to Kiel. And the Germans say now that this European war of 1914 and 1915 could never have taken place but for the possession of Heligoland!

It is forgivable to feel some satisfaction in knowing that that hard man Bismarck, who had cast off so many, friend and foe alike, when he could squeeze nothing more out of them, went begging at the last to the woman whose life he had done his best to mar, the Empress Frederick, not knowing that she had helped in his undoing. Finding that her son was rebelling against the autocracy of his Chancellor, she had drawn him once more under the influence of his old tutor Hinzpeter, whose whole nature was opposed to the ruthlessness of Bismarck; and so she had helped to make the breach final. Bismarck, catching at every straw, went so far as to inspire an article in one of our great “dailies” upon the admiration he felt for the Empress; and he went to ask her intercession, reminding her of a service he had done her--though he did not recall that it was at her husband’s orders--two years earlier. She, whom he had persecuted for more than thirty years, whose home he had filled with his spies, whose son he had alienated, whose adopted country he had turned in hatred against her, could do nothing to soften the blow to him.

In this crisis Bismarck knew no reticence. He showed only too plainly his mortification, and loudly demanded that every one should know that he went from his post against his will. Visitors who called to take leave of him were entertained by Princess Bismarck’s denunciations of the Kaiser--

“The brat, the stupid brat!” she cried over and over again.

_Punch_ published its noted cartoon of “Dropping the Pilot,” which highly delighted William, and Bismarck said bitterly that the Kaiser saw in it a justification of his action.

Though the Kaiser revisited England every year until 1896 he was already meditating how and when he could use his new fleet, and keeping a sharp eye on Africa, ready to pounce upon any chance of a colony. As an American, Pulteney Bigelow, said in 1891, “Germany waits from day to day to mobilize her troops and march to the frontier.” From that time for five years William was intriguing in South Africa, and Europe looked on with some amusement, for Britain had been so successful in land-grabbing that a little trouble for her was regarded as legitimate. Great Britain claimed suzerainty over the Transvaal, but the Kaiser practically recognized its independence, in spite of the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884. In the troubles which followed Germany was regarded as the warm friend of the Boers, and a banquet was given among the leading Boers in honour of the Kaiser’s birthday in January 1895, at which Kruger referred in glowing words to William, saying that the friendship of Germany for his nation would in the future be more firmly established than ever. There is no doubt that, England being the one whom Kruger hated, he expected the help of William in getting rid of its control. The knowledge of this reached England, of course, and Chamberlain felt it necessary to announce that the conventions would be adhered to, and in May Tongoland and Kosi Bay were annexed, which shut the Boers from the sea. This may seem arbitrary, but though the Boers had long had the chance of securing Kosi Bay they had refused to comply with the necessary conditions. The result of this was that England and Portugal joined up on the east coast of Africa at a point which the Germans were beginning to consider specially necessary to themselves, and the annexation was made specially to prevent Germany from having a spot at which she could land troops in aid of the Boers, and where she could secure the rights over the Delagoa railway.

William made overtures to Russia to aid him in his championship of the Boers, and Russia turned her back on him; France refused to become ally to her enemy, so he approached Portugal, haughtily demanding that his troops should land in Delagoa Bay on their way to Pretoria. And he did all this, imagining that at his word Britain would waive her suzerainty over the Transvaal, although more than half the inhabitants were European, possessing nine-tenths of the country’s wealth and half the land.

The cause of dispute between the Boers and the Uitlanders, or Europeans, was comprehensible enough. The Boers cared nothing for gold, diamonds or mines; they wanted to farm their land and to be left in peace and in patriarchal family squalor. Europeans insisted upon digging mines, making railways, and otherwise upsetting the land-dwellers; so the latter put every possible difficulty in the way of the former. To the English land-grabber in distant lands rights of property do not exist, except for himself, and it cannot be expected that he should be treated gently. The Boers did what they could to protect themselves: they allowed the strangers no political rights, seeing a definite swamping for themselves if they did so; they secured monopolies of all important things necessary for the miners, such as fuel, petrol, etc., and made their enemies pay through the nose; they taxed the Uitlanders to extinction, allowed them no schools for their children, and bound them so tightly hand and foot as to make their lives unbearable. I am stating facts, not upholding ethics for one side or the other. This struggle, pushed to extremes, could only end in war, and Cecil Rhodes, then Prime Minister of Cape Colony, made the first move towards the reopening of the conflict which had been closed by Gladstone in 1883. He, with Dr. Jameson and Alfred Beit, laid a plan of invasion, by which the two latter were to cross the border and join up with Uitlanders in Johannesburg. Delay was, however, necessary, as arms and men were not ready, but Jameson had the adventure in his blood and started against orders. He and his men fell into the Boers’ hands, and the Jameson Raid was a foregone failure.

Upon this the Queen’s grandson William sent an open telegram to Kruger congratulating him that “without appealing to the help of friendly Powers” he had repelled the invasion. Of course, every one knew that he meant himself by “friendly Powers,” and England was wild with anger against him over this folly, so the Queen wrote her beloved young relative a stiff letter, such as she could write when moved, pointing out that his interference in South Africa would most assuredly mean war. As William was not then ready for war he climbed down, ordered his newspapers to explain the incident away and express surprise that the English Press should have made so much over so little. When Kruger went to Berlin later, and for the second time, William refused to see him.

From that point there was some bitterness between Victoria and the Kaiser, though both of them diplomatically tried to hide that fact. When returning from Nice that spring Victoria came through Germany, that she might meet her grandson and assure him that her neglect to return his visits was not due to indifference, as he had suggested; but she did not go to Berlin. William, on his part, sent her a present in the summer, perhaps with a sly hint of menace behind it; for it took the form of a fountain fashioned as an eagle flapping its wings, the water issuing through its beak so that it looked as though flying through spray. It was set up in a little garden near another fountain presented by Emperor William I, and one feels that the Prussian eagle seemingly flying through Windsor gardens was somewhat ominous.

Kaiser William did not come to England again until 1899, and it has been said that he never came without squeezing something out of his grandmother. That year he obtained an island in the Samoan group--probably with a view to making raids on Australia and New Zealand. The cartoonists got to work over this, and _Figaro_ gave a picture of the Queen cutting for him a large slice off a plum pudding named the World, William, dressed as a sailor, running eagerly for it. Another drawing showed him wiping her eyes with a handkerchief labelled Delagoa Bay, while out of his pocket protruded a treaty with the word Samoa upon it.

Cecil Rhodes came to London in 1896 to face the music caused by the Jameson raid, and a great speech was expected; but four days later he left, having said no word in public. During that short period he was summoned to Windsor. It was the second time that he had had an audience of the Queen. The first time was in 1891, when he dined and slept at Windsor and had a long talk with her Majesty over South African affairs, during which she showed an astonishingly intimate knowledge of the country. After he had gone some one remarked to the Queen that he was a great woman-hater, upon which she replied, with her delightful simplicity--I hope she felt a touch of humour in making such a reply--“Oh, he was very kind to me!”

To the second interview Rhodes went in “a state of awful funk,” says Mr. Harry Furniss in his book, _Harry Furniss at Home_; but he received only a mild remonstrance, much to his surprise, for he had expected a severe scolding, and he looked uncommonly relieved. The Queen in her heart was glad that the South African matter was being reopened, and that at last there was a chance of reversing the earlier policy.

There is a story of another South African millionaire, evidently a German, being received by Victoria, to whom she said--

“Sind sie ein Baier?”

He, being confused and perhaps not expecting to be addressed in German, replied, “Not at present prices, ma’am.”

In 1898 there occurred a new cause of trouble between the English Court and the Kaiser, one which is not likely to appear in the history books. When Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg died in 1893 the Queen’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, took possession of the little German principality and went to live there, giving up the allowance of £15,000 made by our Parliament, but retaining the extra £10,000 allotted to him on his marriage. He had one son, Alfred, who would have succeeded him had he not fallen into the Kaiser’s power.

From the day he ascended his throne the Kaiser assumed despotic authority over all his relations, interfering in their domestic affairs and ordering their goings out and their comings in. One instance of this is fairly well known. Princess Frederick Leopold, sister to the present Kaiserin, went skating with only one lady in attendance, and, getting on to thin ice, fell in, being promptly rescued. William, on hearing of it, immediately ordered the punishment of Prince Frederick for allowing his wife so much liberty. Neither Prince nor Princess was allowed to leave their house for a certain number of days, and all lights were to be put out in their rooms at eight o’clock every evening, as though they were two naughty children.

When he found that a young cousin of his own was to live in Coburg, William demanded that the education of the boy should be given over to him, and had him brought to Berlin away from his family. Once having Alfred there, he placed him in a military circle and forgot him. No motherly or fatherly control was exercised by the Imperial couple, and being left entirely to his own devices he got into bad company, was fleeced by gamblers, slipped heavily into debt, and lost both his reputation and his health. Learning something of all this, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg went to Berlin and plucked his son away into what he hoped was safety. It was too late, however; the young man died shortly after, in February 1899, at Meran, of phthisis. So says the biographer, but the report at the time was that he had shot himself.

An heir being needed for the Saxe-Coburg throne, the Duke of Connaught was named. At first he accepted the prospect, but on second thoughts, and considering his own young son in connection with his Prussian nephew’s peculiarities, he decided that the risk was too great; and so he, with the Queen’s strong approval, refused the chance of reigning over his father’s country. Connaught had been Victoria’s favourite son since the death of the Duke of Albany, and she wished to lose him as little as she wished another grandson to share the fate of Alfred. Eventually the boy Duke of Albany was appointed heir, there being then every reason to hope that it would be many years before he would take his place in Germany. To-day he is fighting against those who nurtured and brought him up.

There was another prince who, for the same reason, held aloof from Berlin, and that was the Duke of Cumberland, who, but for Bismarck, would have been King of Hanover. Because he had no wish to see his son delivered over to the mercies of the Kaiser he resolutely refused all Prussian invitations to forgive the injury of 1866.