PRINCESS LOUISE.
VIII.
THE PRINCESS LOUISE.
This lady, who has been for some years past our neighbor and our occasional visitor, always welcome, is the sixth child of the Queen of England. If any suppose that people who inhabit royal palaces are exempt either from the sorrows or from the apprehensions of the human lot, they have but to turn to the letters of Prince Albert in which the Prince mentions the birth of this daughter, to discover their mistake. It was in 1848, the year of revolution in Europe, when Louis Philippe of France fled across the sea, and every throne on the continent seemed tottering to its fall. There was panic in every royal abode. At Buckingham Palace, where the Queen of England was then expecting the birth of her child, if there was less alarm, there was not less grief for the troubles and perils of near and dear relations. In the midst of the political convulsion, Prince Albert received the news of the death of his grandmother, and he wrote of this sad event quite in the human style, as though he were no Prince at all.
"Alas!" said he, "the news you sent were heavy news indeed. The dear, good grandmamma! She was an angel upon earth, and to us ever so good and loving. What dismal times are these! I cannot give full way to my own grief, harrassed as we both are with the terrible present. Augustus, Clementine Nemours, and the Duchess of Montpensier have come to us, one by one, like people shipwrecked ; Victorie, Alexander, the King, the Queen, are still tossing upon the waves, or have drifted to other shores; we know nothing of them. France is in flames; Belgium is menaced. We have a ministerial, money, and tax crisis; and Victoria is on the point of being confined. My heart is heavy."
These words were written February 29, 1848. One after another, the French princes and ministers came straggling in from frantic France to steady-going England, finding refuge in her royal palaces. In a few days the Prince wrote joyfully to his staunch and able friend, Baron Stockmar:
"I have good news for you to-day. Victoria was safely delivered this morning, and, though it be a daughter, still my joy and gratitude are very great, as I was often full of misgiving because of the many moral shocks which have crowded upon Victoria of late. V. and the baby are perfectly well."
Thus, the Princess was born in the midst of the storm that swept over the world in March, 1848. The tempest was of such a nature that no precautions could prevent the thunder of it penetrating the apartments of the Queen. She was able, nevertheless, to preserve her tranquility through it all.
"From the first," she wrote to King Leopold, as soon as she held a pen, "I heard all that passed; and my only thoughts and talk were politics. But I never was calmer, and quieter, or less nervous. Great events make me calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves."
A few weeks later, while public affairs were still stringent and alarming, the child was baptized in the chapel of Buckingham Palace, when she received the names of Louise Caroline Alberta. For this interesting occasion Prince Albert adapted the music of a chorale which he had composed some years before. It was performed at the christening, and has since become a popular tune in England under the name of Gotha. It was about this time that Prince Albert made his first public address in England, which was well received by the people, and caused him to write with exultation that monarchy never stood higher in England than it does at the present moment."
The life of a Princess, viewed from the exterior, is but a series of pageants, of which in this country it is impossible to tell the significance, and therefore they need not occupy us. The Princess Louise shares to the full that temperament of the artist, that taste for everything beautiful and high, which characterizes several of Prince Albert's children. Her talents were cultivated under the best influences and appliances. At the age of twenty-three years she departed from the usage of royal families in marrying the Marquis of Lorne, the eldest son and heir of the Duke of Argyle, the author of the "Reign of Law," and of other works that hover along the verge of heterodoxy. In 1878, the late Lord Beaconsfield, who knew so well how to pay court to the royal family, named Lord Lorne Governor-General of the Dominion of Canada, to succeed Lord Dufferin, the most gifted person who ever held the office. It was a severe test to a young man of twenty-three, though invested with the prestige of a royal alliance. It will probably be found when the account comes to be made up, that the young Governor, by his extensive tours in the remote parts of the Dominion, has done as much to make Canada known, and to attract emigration, as the brilliant and humorous speeches of his more experienced predecessor.
Certainly, our friends, the people of Canada, have been very happy of late in seeing the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise the occupants of their Governor-General's mansion. The British empire in general gets a great deal of comfort and exhilaration from its royal family, and no portion of the empire more warmly cherishes the sentiment of loyalty than the distant colonies.
We can observe this by just stepping across the border line between Canada and the United States. Recently, I spent a day or two at Calais, in Maine, which is separated from St. Stephens, in New Brunswick, by the river St. Croix, a stream so narrow that it is crossed by a covered wooden bridge. The two towns are not more than a hundred yards apart. People cross and recross as freely as they go from one street to another of their own town. Calais ladies who want a pair of kid gloves step over to New Brunswick and buy them; and St. Stephens ladies in quest of a patent nutmeg-grater cross to the United States and supply their want. Between the inhabitants of the two places there is the most perfect friendliness of feeling. They intermarry; they become partners in business; they go to one another's parties, lectures, concerts, churches; in short, they mingle in every way, and co-operate in everything—except one!
The exception is politics. Over Calais wave the stars and stripes; over St. Stephens "the meteor flag of England." At Calais—town meetings, republican rallies, democratic caucuses, the Maine Law, Fourth of July, and Hurrah for Blaine. At St. Stephens—our gracious queen, gossip of changes in the dominion ministry, and portraits of the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise. It is like two people sitting side by side with their hands almost touching; but, near as those hands are, each draws its life blood from another heart, and its nervous force from another brain.
Some of the polite inhabitants of St. Stephens have a "Peerage upon their tables; while two-thirds of the people of Calais scarcely have an idea what a Peerage is. A little information, therefore, concerning the new Governor-General may not be unacceptable on our side of the river. Lord Dufferin, in speaking of his successor, said that the Marquis of Lorne "came of good Whig stock," or, in other words, of a family whose historical importance was founded upon the sacrifices they had made in the cause of constitutional liberty."
"When a couple of a man's ancestors," added Lord Dufferin, "have perished on the scaffold as martyrs to the cause of political and religious freedom, you may be sure there is little likelihood of this descendant seeking to encroach upon the privileges of Parliament, or the independence of the people."
Lord Dufferin referred in this passage, first, to the Earl of Argyll, executed in 1660, for the firmness with which he maintained the independence of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. It was he who said, as he laid his head upon the block:
"I could die like a Roman, but choose rather to die as a Christian."
The son of this nobleman, another Earl of Argyll, lost his head a few years after, in the reign of James II. Being called upon to take what was called the test oath of 1661, he refused on two grounds: first, that the oath was inconsistent with itself; and, secondly, that it was inconsistent with the Protestant religion. Upon this he was convicted of high treason, sentenced to death, his estates confiscated, and his arms torn down. He escaped into Holland; whence returning, after the death of Charles the Second, he joined the Duke of Monmouth in his rebellion, and soon shared the misfortunes of that incompetent leader. Argyll being taken prisoner, was executed upon his former sentence, and met his death with fortitude.
The family from which the Marquis of Lorne descends is one of the most ancient in Europe; it may even be the most ancient; for there is some reason to think that while the Romans possessed Britain one of his ancestors was already chief of a Scottish clan, afterwards known as the Clan Campbell. From about the year 1250 the history of the family is recorded and traceable; the present Duke of Argyll, father of the Marquis of Lorne, being the twenty-first lineal inheritor of the family honors. Two centuries before the discovery of America the head of the Campbells fought for Robert Bruce; and one of his sons appears to have founded a line from which sprang Duncan, King of Scotland, who was murdered by Macbeth. About the year 1300 the chief of the Campbells married Marguerite, daughter of the King of Scotland. Two centuries later, Colin V, the first of the Campbells who was called Count of Argyll, married Isabelle Stuart, another princess of the blood royal. The present Marquis of Lorne, therefore, is the third of his family who has married a princess of royal lineage.
During many ages the chief of a Scottish clan was little more than the head of a numerous band of robbers, who lived in rude, precarious abundance, in habitations which had no other desirable quality but that of strength to repel attacks. His landed possessions were extensive, but little productive, until better modes of culture and the working of mines and quarries enabled the lands to support a more numerous population. The present Duke of Argyll is one of the few great landowners of his country. He has, it is said, an estate so extensive that he can ride thirty miles in a straight line without going off his own land. This seems highly absurd; and it is reasonable to think that, in the course of another century or so, social science will have devised some agreeable and just mode of relieving the family of a part of this burden.
During the last two or three generations the Dukes of Argyll, though descended from this long line of mail-clad chiefs, men of the spear and the battle-axe, have been noted for literary tastes, a love of science, and a devotion to the general intellectual interests of their country. A Duke of Argyll of the last century collected one of the best private libraries in Europe. The present Duke, as just remarked, has written a work of much celebrity called, "The Reign of Law." He has written also an essay upon the ecclesiastical history of Scotland from the time of John Knox. His eldest son, the Marquis of Lorne, is the author of a small book of travels, called "A Trip to the Tropics and Home through America." He also gave the world, a year or two since, a book of poems, which I should judge, from the extracts published in the English papers, to be of a mild and harmless quality, not exactly what we should expect from a descendant of the Scottish Chiefs.
The reader, perhaps, may like to know the name of the Governor-General. He is well supplied with the article of name. It is John George Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Marquis of Lorne. He is now thirty-eight years of age. He has served in the House of Commons, and as private secretary to his father, when his father was in the ministry. In 1871 he married the Princess Louise, a princess of whom such good things are spoken that, doubtless, she would have been beloved if she had not been a princess. Lord Dufferin, who began his public life as Lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, an office which brought him into familiar intercourse with the Queen and her children, pronounced a noble eulogium upon her, on taking leave of the people of Canada. He spoke of her "artistic genius," of her devotion to good objects, of her ready sympathy with the poor and lowly. He described her as being not only a princess of what he called "majestic lineage," but a good and noble woman, in whom the humblest settler in Canada would find an intelligent and sympathetic friend.
"She will soon be among you," said he, "taking all hearts by storm by the grace, the suavity, the sweet simplicity of her manners, life, and conversation. Gentlemen, if ever there was a lady who in her earliest youth had formed a high ideal of what a noble life should be—if ever there was a human being who tried to make the most of the opportunities within her reach, and to create for herself, in spite of every possible trammel and impediment, a useful career and occasions of benefiting her fellow-creatures, it is the Princess Louise, whose unpretending exertions in a hundred different directions to be of service to her country and generation have already won for her an extraordinary amount of popularity at home."
The people of Canada are to be congratulated upon having at the head of their government two individuals who are exempt from the harsh criticism to which partisan strife usually subjects party leaders. This, indeed, is one of the excellent points of their system; the head of the government being removed from party contests, not affected by party changes, not liable to party animosities, a center to which all eyes are directed with fondness and pride. The republicans of the future will probably have this advantage, without the inconveniences attached to hereditary rank. The French Republic enjoys it, in some degree, at the present moment, since the president governs through ministers, who go out of office when they cannot command a majority of the national legislature. Thus there is a happy blending of the fixed and the changeable; of the useful and the ornamental; of the conservative and the progressive.
It is not improbable that we may have something of the kind in due time; a president elected for a somewhat longer term than at present, not eligible for a second term, and governing through ministers sitting in the House of Representatives. The president could then be something more of an ornamental person than he now is, and be free from the excessive toils of administration. I am glad we have the Dominion of Canada for a neighbor, that each country may, now and then, get a valuable notion from the other.