Queen Victoria's - Aunt Queen Adelaide. By Mary Hopkirk. (John Murray.
15s.) QUEEN ApELAIDE has left but faint traces in popular memory. A great Australian city bears her name. She is still known to members of the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars as their first Colonel-in- Chief. Yet this kindly aunt of Queen Victors and wife of William IV died as Queen Dowager of England only in 1849. Intimate records of her life are few. Her only surviving letters were written to her niece Victoria. Contemporary memoir-writers, with, the spiteful exception of Greville, speak of her _with universal affection and respect, if without deep impression.
Mrs. Hopkirk has now written a new biography of Queen Adelaide, which shows a patient and extensive search of contemporary sources and references to her subject. Mrs. Hopkirk finds it understandably hard to resist the temptation to overstress the comedy of vice and character revealed in the lives of the immediate progeny of George III, though many of the anecdotes certainly bear repetition. But as she is telling a very moral story—the salvation of an un- regenerate old sailor prince by a devoted little German princess—the backcloth of Regency scandal provides a justifiable artistic effect.
As this book shows, Adelaide took her husband in hand, paid his debts, accepted his children, smoothed over his public indiscretions, and, when he became king, she kept ticie Royal family together, and brought back dignity and respectability to the Crown and to the Court. Her services to the British Crown were thus not inconsider- able, and Mrs. Hopkirk, who has clearly acquired an affectionate regard for her subject, does do justice to the touching loyalties and steady affections of Queen Adelaide, and has rightly drawn attention to her role in the public life of a hundred years ago.
F. W. DEAICIN.
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