The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

But then came the news of the emperor’s surrender at Sedan. Eugénie was up all night; council after council was held, as new reports and scraps of information arrived. Finally it was decided that she should ride on horseback through the streets of Paris, and herself proclaim to the unpopular legislature its dissolution. This resolution, however, was never carried into effect, for lack of a riding-dress! A plain, black habit, with the cross of the Legion of Honor pinned upon her breast, was what she had decided to wear. Was it a fatality that out of the three hundred and sixty dresses then hanging in their wardrobes at the Tuileries, the needed one was missing? A few days before there had been a general stampede of servants, who had gone off, carrying great quantities of imperial property, and the dark riding-dress, which the empress now sought, had probably been among the spoils of her domestics. There was only one habit to be found, and that was neither black nor plain. It was a dress of gorgeous green, embroidered with gold, and designed to be worn with a three-cornered Louis XV. hat, the costume of the imperial hunt at Fontainebleau. This was pronounced, with evident justice, to be too theatrical, and the enterprise was consequently abandoned.

“What grotesque mischances mar great destinies and shift potent purposes!” The lack of a spur by the messenger whom Louis XVI. had sent to call M. de Machault to the post of prime minister, delayed his departure, and thus – by giving Madame Adelaide time to write, in favor of her friend the Count de Maurepas, to that feeblest of monarchs who, not being able to withstand the strongly worded appeal of his strong-minded aunt, recalled his messenger as he was mounting his horse, – caused an entire change in the policy of the ministry of the kingdom.

And now “the lack of a petticoat – on the testimony of Thiers himself, who spoke of it afterward – brought about the expulsion of a dynasty; for had the woman, pathetic in her misfortune, ridden out among the multitude, like Elizabeth to Tilbury fort, the chivalrous sentiment of Paris would have acclaimed her, and the history of a people would have been written in less lurid colors.”

Upon the fourth of September, the mob so long feared made its appearance. The infuriated insurgents to the number of one hundred and fifty thousand crowded the Tuileries gardens, the Place de la Concorde, and the Champs Élysées, shouting, “Down with the Empire! down with Bonaparte! death to the man of December!”

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Signor Nigra, the Italian ambassador, entered the empress’ apartment, to tell her that the time for flight had come. “You have not an instant to lose,” he said. “The revolutionists are entering the palace by the Place du Carrousel.”

And now for the first time Eugénie’s courage wavered; but she mastered her emotion, and giving her hand to the ambassador, with a melancholy flash of her old imperial grandeur, said calmly, “I will take leave of our friends.”

“The door of the white drawing-room was thrown open, and the empress appeared for a moment on the threshold – an inexpressibly touching figure, in her simple black dress and white collar. She made a courtesy and waved her hand, trying hard to smile, while many – not all of them women – were sobbing aloud. Then, with gentle persuasion, Prince Richard Metternich, the Austrian ambassador, drew her back, and the door was closed again.”

Through the magnificent galleries of the Louvre, hung with the masterpieces of Rubens, Van Dyke, Leonardo, Poussin, Claude, and the imperishable dynasties of art, fled the Empress Eugénie and her few faithful followers.

The square of St. Germain L’Auxerrois was empty. A cab stood by the curb. The veiled empress and Madame Carette, her lady-in-waiting, escorted by Signor Nigra, Prince Metternich, and M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, approached it.

Sinking back upon the cushions, Eugénie for an instant raised her veil to catch a last glimpse of the Louvre. As her eye rested on that fatal colonnade, where Catherine de’ Medici and the king had stood on the night of St. Bartholomew, a little ragamuffin, seated on the stone foundation of the golden railing, started up, shouting, “There is the empress!”

A group of artisans, lounging at the corner, vaguely caught the cry and came forward. But M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, with admirable presence of mind, caught the urchin, whirled him round and sent him sprawling in the roadway, saying furiously: —

“Ah, you are crying ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ are you? That will teach you to hurrah for the Bonapartes, when the Republic is proclaimed.”

The group on the sidewalk approved this laudable sentiment. M. de Lesseps sprang inside, with the empress. The cab was whirled away; and thus ended for Eugénie de Montijo the empty dream of greatness, by which she had been so long beguiled.

Leaving Paris, she embarked on board the yacht Gazelle, and was conveyed to England, where Victoria and the royal family received her with great kindness, and placed at her disposal the beautiful country residence of Camden Place, Chiselhurst. Here she was joined by the Prince Imperial, and later by Louis Napoleon.

“Camden Place, Chiselhurst, 1871. A gentleman sixty-three years of age, a lady, and a youth of fifteen are resting in the pleasure grounds of an English rural mansion. This does not seem much. But this gentleman is he who, a twelvemonth since, was emperor of the French nation, and the most powerful monarch in Europe. He is a student and a writer – as well as an actor – of history, which must have taught him the value of an imperial title. Can he think it worth the pursuit or possession, having once sat upon a throne which was perhaps not so agreeable as his present seat on the Chiselhurst garden-chair? If he desires, for himself or for his son, to leave Camden Place, or a similar abode, and go back to the Tuileries Palace, we can only say it is a matter of taste.”

But Louis Napoleon was not destined to behold again the Tuileries Palace. On the 9th of January, 1873, he died, consoled by the presence of the empress, but not of the Prince Imperial, who, summoned from Woolwich, arrived too late to see him alive.

All the hopes and affections of the widowed empress then centred in her son, and his recent fate cannot but be remembered. He joined the expedition to Zululand, and on the first of June, 1879, perished by the javelins of the savages while scouting with a few companions. On the 10th of July, the body arrived in England, and on the 12th the final ceremony took place at Chiselhurst. It was a soldier’s funeral, but there was no glare and glitter of martial splendor.

Mind rather than matter was pre-eminent in giving voice to the public sorrow. At the head of the military pageant, whose every feature was pervaded with a genuine pathos, marched the cadets of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, with arms reversed; then, to the solemn strains of the “Dead March,” the Royal Artillery Band; then the cross before the gun; and then the gun, drawn by six dark-brown horses by whose sides rode mounted artillerymen. The coffin above the gun was wrapped in the English and French flags. The sword of the prince, his belt, and sabre-tache were placed upon it; while on a cushion were the great cross and ribbon of the Legion of Honor.

By the side of the coffin walked the pall-bearers, the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Connaught, the Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway, and M. Rouher on the left. The Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, Prince Leopold, and the Duke of Bassano on the right. Behind the coffin came the prince’s favorite horse, “Stag,” caparisoned in the white and silver starred trappings of the imperial stable, and led by M. Gamble, the faithful retainer who had attended the baptism of the prince, and who now followed his coffin. Next came the chief mourners, Prince Napoleon and his sons, Prince Victor and Prince Louis; Prince Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Joachim Murat, Prince Napoleon Charles Bonaparte, and Prince Louis Murat.

After these came the great officers of the imperial crown, and many personages of princely rank not related by kindred.

So mournful a ceremony was not regarded in the light of a spectacle, and even the elements accorded with the nature of the scene. There was no sun to flash from the polished helmets of the Lancers, or linger on the gold of the splendidly mounted Horse-Artillery.

“It was an unusual and impressive sight to see that strangely and variously composed line of soldiers on horseback, and priests and mourners on foot, moving slowly along the serpentine road across the great, uneven plain of the common, with thousands of spectators stationary on either hand.”

To those who thought of the widowed, childless empress in her lonely house, and knew that the chief mourners were princes, and that the queen was watching the procession from her black tribune, unless she had left it to console the sorrowing mother, the sight was much more than impressive.

“The tragic elements which prevailed at the death of the prince, the inexpressible desolation of the imperial mother, the lessons of mutability in human affairs which the case enforced upon the mind, the remembrance of the virtues of the departed young man, and the tale of broken hopes, baffled aspirations, and defeated purposes, which the circumstances so clearly exhibited, preoccupied the thoughts and feelings of the mourners, and shut off for the time being all interest in the mere external traits of the scene. The realities to which it pointed stood out so clearly from the outward semblances in which they were pictured, that the latter were forgotten, and the overpowering force of the former were exclusively recognized.

“Seldom in recent times has any public ceremonial so closely touched the hearts of those who took part in it.”

And now in the little Roman Catholic church at Chiselhurst, by the side of the emperor his father, lies all that was mortal of Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph, Prince Imperial.

Requiescat in pace.

Under the elms at Chiselhurst, at the close of a mild spring afternoon, we may see a lady walking. Her figure, once so straight and graceful, is slightly bowed with age, and her fast-whitening hair is covered by a widow’s cap. And as she turns toward us her sad face, still retaining the traces of its former loveliness, we recognize her whom we have seen seated, amid the pomp and pageantry of a court, upon the throne at the Tuileries Palace, and flying with her scanty escort through the galleries of the Louvre, – Eugénie de Montijo, Comtesse de Téba, the once brilliant empress of the French.

QUEEN VICTORIA.

A.D. 1819

“Broad based upon her people’s will,
And compassed by the inviolate sea.”

    Tennyson, To the Queen.

FIFTY years a queen! and still seated upon her ancestral throne. This is the remarkable record of England’s present sovereign. This fact alone would make the reign of Queen Victoria illustrious. But more than this, she has reigned during one half of this marvellous nineteenth century – a period phenomenal among the centuries of history.

Although the Victorian Era has not produced a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante, or a Milton, it will be remembered as an epoch of astounding progress, not only in England and Europe, but throughout the civilized world.

The unprecedented onrush of the mighty waves of enlightened civilization, bearing to all lands the blessings of Christian liberty; the flashing and dazzling lights of wonderful inventions and results of scientific researches, which have belted the world with gleaming bands of iron, chained the lightning at man’s bidding, caught and imprisoned the waves of sound, unlocked the secrets of the earth, and almost annihilated space and time, – these are some of the marvellous achievements of the nineteenth century which make the history of the past one hundred years read like the story of the most amazing transformations ever invented by the imagination in Oriental fairy tales or attributed to the weird magicians of the Arabian Nights.

Telegraphs, railroads, telephones, electric lights, phonographs, photography, the discovery of petroleum, the improved use of steam, the invention of Bessemer steel, and the practical use of gaslight for the illumination of cities, are all numbered among the inventions and discoveries of the nineteenth century.

But more wonderful still, perhaps, is the rise of the mighty Republic of the United States, which, though beginning in the eighteenth century as an independent power, has, in the short space of a little more than one hundred years, taken the foremost place in the rank of nations, and stands to-day the miracle of the nineteenth century.

To have reigned for fifty years, the sovereign of one of the greatest powers of the world, during such a time of human progress and religious liberty, will make the Victorian Age shine forth in the pages of history as one of the most resplendent epochs in the annals of the world.

Alexandrina Victoria, called by her German relations “the little Mayflower,” was born on the 24th of May, 1819. She was the granddaughter of George III. of England; her father being Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of that monarch.

Her mother was Victoria, the sister of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and widow of the Prince of Leiningen. The baby Princess Victoria was left fatherless at the age of eight months, and an establishment was formed for the future queen at Kensington Palace, under the superintendence of her mother, the Duchess of Kent. The education of Victoria was carefully watched, although she was not allowed to know that she was heir to the throne, until she was twelve years old. At this time it was thought best to make known to the little princess her future prospects; and her tutor, Dr. Davys, gave her a lesson in tracing out the genealogy of English royalty. At length the young princess exclaimed, with some astonishment, “Mamma, I cannot see who is to come after Uncle William, unless it is myself.”

Upon being told that this was the fact, she said in an unusually thoughtful manner for one so young: —

“It is a very solemn thing. Many a child would boast, but they don’t know the difficulty. There is splendor, but there is responsibility;” then, with an expressive gesture, she earnestly continued, “I will be good.” And the verdict of fifty years of sovereignty has been, “Good mother, queen, and wife.”

At five o’clock, on the morning of the 21st of June, 1837, the Princess Victoria, then a young girl of eighteen, was awakened from her slumbers and saluted as queen. Hastily throwing over her night-robes a loose wrapper, and with slippers on her bare feet, and hair in unregarded disorder, she was ushered into an apartment where stood the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham, who had just arrived at Kensington, and demanded to see the “Queen” immediately. State business will not wait for ladies’ toilets, and the déshabillé of the young princess was rather impressive than unbecoming, as the grave elderly men bent the knee before her and addressed her as “Your Majesty.” The king was dead, and Victoria was queen. Even as the royal salutation fell upon her youthful ears, the fair young girl seemed in a moment to don a new garment of dignity and self-possession. She had been always retiring, and obedient to others, to a marked degree, but as the words “Your Majesty” were addressed to her for the first time, she instantly put out her hand to receive the customary kiss of allegiance, and even attired as she was, looked a very sovereign. From that moment Victoria assumed all the dignity and prerogatives of a queen. She had been the most docile of daughters; but as queen, the Duchess of Kent, her mother, received only her filial affection, and was allowed no privilege of dictating the affairs of state, or even advising her royal daughter regarding her actions or duties as sovereign.

The young queen took as her residence Buckingham Palace, making Windsor Castle her country home. Mr. Charles Greville says of her at this time: “The queen’s manner and bearing are perfect. It is the remarkable union of naïveté, kindness, nature, – good nature, with propriety and dignity, which make her so admirable and so endearing to those about her, as she certainly is. I have been repeatedly told that they are all warmly attached to her, but albeit all feel the impossibility of for a moment losing sight of the respect which they owe her. She never ceases to be a queen, and is always the most charming, cheerful and obliging, unaffected queen in the world.”

On the 28th of June, 1838, occurred the coronation of Queen Victoria. The famous musical composer, Felix Mendelssohn, who was then in London, thus writes concerning the imposing pageant: “At a quarter-past twelve the procession began to arrive at Westminster Abbey, and by an hour later the whole had been absorbed in the cathedral. Nothing more brilliant could be seen than all the beautiful horses, with their rich harness, the carriages and grooms covered with gold embroideries, and the splendidly dressed people inside. All this, too, was encircled by the venerable gray buildings, and the crowds of common people under the dull sky, which was only now and then pierced by sunbeams; at first, indeed, it rained. But when the golden, fairy-like carriage, supported by Tritons with their tridents and surmounted by the great crown of England, drove up, and the graceful girl was seen bowing right and left – when at that instant the mass of people was completely hidden by their waving handkerchiefs and raised hats, while one roar of cheering almost drowned the pealing of the bells, the blare of the trumpets, and thundering of the guns, one had to pinch one’s self to make sure it was not all a dream out of the Arabian Nights. Then fell a sudden silence, the silence of a church, after the queen had entered the cathedral. I mixed among the crowd, walked up to the door of the abbey, and peered into the solemn obscurity; but my involuntary emotion was dispelled by a sense of the ludicrous as I looked closely at their dressed-up, modern cinque-centi halberdiers (the beef-eaters), whose cheeks suggest beef, and whose noses tell tales of whiskey and claret.”

Victoria wore a royal robe of crimson velvet, furred with ermine and bordered with gold. A small circlet of gold banded her head, and the collar of the Order of the Garter adorned her neck. Three swords were borne before her, emblems of justice, defence, and mercy. Her train was carried by eight young maidens of high rank, dressed in cloth of silver, with roses in their hair. After the queen entered the cathedral and advanced to the foot of the throne, she knelt there for a moment in devotion. As she rose, the Archbishop of Canterbury turned her round to each of the four corners of the abbey, saying to the assembled people: “Sirs, I here present unto you the undoubted queen of this realm. Will ye all swear to do her homage?” Each time he asked the question the air rang with shouts of “Long live Queen Victoria!”

The anointing followed, whereupon the archbishop gave her his benediction. The primate then placed her on the throne, or rather in St. Edward’s chair, used by the sovereigns in this ceremony since Edward the Confessor. The young queen then received the ring, betrothing her to her people, and the orb of empire – a small globe surmounted by a cross – was placed in her hand, and the sceptre of rule was given to her. The crown of England was then laid upon her head by the archbishop, and at the same moment peers and peeresses donned their coronets; bishops, their mitres; heralds, their caps; the trumpets sounded, the drums beat, the cannon boomed, and the Tower guns answered, and the shouts of the people broke forth in loud and joyous acclamations. The archbishop then presented the Bible to her Majesty, and bent in homage. He was followed by bishops and lords, according to their rank, who each in turn, lifting their coronets, touched the crown on the queen’s head, and repeated the oath of allegiance.

The Communion Service followed; and the queen, in homage to the King of kings, removed her crown while she received the sacrament. Then, resuming her royal diadem, with the sceptre in one hand, and the orb of empire in the other, the crowned queen of England left the abbey, followed by her imposing retinue.

Mr. Charles Greville gives us this little bit of human nature enacted between these pompous scenes of solemn ceremony: —