QUEEN VICTORIA AND GERMANY.
[COHMITY:CATRD.1
NEITHER the scholar, the politician, nor the general reader can be expected to find much pleasure in a book, recently published, that professes to give a presentation, not of events during the last forty years of Queen Victoria's reign, but of her influence on those events, and then proceeds to treat so absorbing a subject with the petty malice of the servants' hall. No object can be gained by naming the book or its writer. It possesses no graces of diction, no force or fire. Calculated to perplex the young and scandalize the middle-aged, it is written in the spirit of the egotist, oe the cynic, or the wayfarer who cuts his name upon a noble tree and defaces with a scribble a marble shrine. Enterprise will extract profit out of any sordid trade, but it is difficult to follow the process of thought that leads an English writer to defame Elizabeth because of her cruelties or Victoria because of her weaknesses. The quality of the contributions made by these two great Sovereigns to the growth of England should preserve them from the jackal and the scavenger. I do not propose to follow the writer of the book in question through pages of malicious suggestion and unscrupulous statement.
Twenty years ago I attempted to draw a picture of the relations between Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers. I am not conscious of possessing a larger alloy of sycophancy than other people, and my wish then was, as it was later, when asked by King Edward to prepare his mother's Correspondence and Journals for publication, to place the character of Queen Victoria simply and truthfully before those who had been her subjects, and to withhold only such facts as would give pain to people still living or their children. The published Journals of the Queen stop on her marriage morn ; the published Correspondence on the day of the Prince Consort's death. It is now suggested that her character, numbed by the Prince's influence, underwent a complete metamorphosis after 1861, and qualities that won the admiration of Peel and the respect of Palmerston de- generated into habits selfish, foolish, and ignoble. The test of truth applied by the writer of this farrago of nonsense is the gutter Press of the time, papers like the Tomahawk and the Hornet, or the swordplay of political faction, thrusting whenever and wherever a weak spot could be found in the armour of the Government of the day. That in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century noisy groups attacked the Crown is well known. A madman in the street fired at the Queen. Members of Parliament accused her of ex- travagance, and writers in the Press lampooned her for parsimony. Her rigid etiquette was at one moment the mark for criticism ; her simple demeanour towards her humble dependants was at the next moment a subject of unbridled satire. There was no pleasing anybody. The trouble was that Democracy was engaged in cutting a back tooth. Italy was in the making ; the United States were in the throes of a struggle for unity and life; the throne of Napoleon III. was tottering; and Bismarck was engaged in welding together forces destined to change the face of Europe. Faddists and revolutionists ploughed the waters in every direction. It was not surprising that Queen Victoria should feel the backwash of so much turmoil. Glancing over the arena where so much passion was roused, and where interests so vital to us were at stake, it is remarkable how the Queen responded, like Elizabeth three centuries before, to the note of the nation's wishes, and never once failed to keep in tune with the sentiments of the vast majority of her people. The historian, taking stock of our national progress through the nineteenth century, would pass lightly over trivialities of temper and feminine weakness, and fix upon the completed task that, after sixty years of unwearied devotion to public duty, chastened by many private sorrows, found world-wide recognition in the Jubilee festivities of 1897. Courtiers may flatter the worst of Sovereigns, but when, from all parts of an Empire reaching to the farthest ends of the earth, her subjects flocked to proclaim their supreme devotion to her person, the Queen was from that moment immune from tongues that hanker after evil speaking.
There is, however, one species of slander that is worth noticing at such a period as this. It is asserted that the Queen's German sympathies, her family connexion with Germany, and her ambitious racial aspirations led her to use her influence for the aggrandizement of Prussia and to the detriment of her own country. Few are qualified to dogmatize on the forces that precipitated the quarrel between Germany and Denmark, and the hour is unfavourable for raking over the ashes of that ancient controversy. There is one salient and undeniable fact, to which the common- sense of every man quickly and surely responds, that frees Queen Victoria from suspicion of German sympathies transcending the natural limits of personal affection for children who had married Germans and maternal regard for their welfare. It was the hatred of Prince Bismarck for the Queen—hatred expressed in coarse and brutal phrases, recorded in his table talk, and dinned into the ears of every one who cared to listen. Bismarck's anathema absolved Queen Victoria. She was to him the caput lupinum, and he struck at her whenever he got a chance. It would be doing him less than justice to suppose that his attacks were directed against the foibles of the woman rather than the achievements of the Sovereign. I am content to rest the vindication of the Queen's ultra-German tendencies upon Bismarck's fear and dislike of her influence. Biographies are printed and perish. King Edward very wisely decided that the Queen should tell her own story, and that her people should know from her Correspondence and Journals the type of woman they had loved and respected. Her sovereign qualities, whatever record leaps to light, never will be shamed. ESHER.
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